It feels only right to begin with an admission: I don’t think I understood what Gieve Patel’s translations meant to him until he died. In short, I wondered if Gieve was hiding behind a somewhat dubious pile of pretexts. Publishing these translations would have proclaimed, for Gieve, a spurious completeness; it would also have meant an act of abandonment, a final forsaking. And still, Gieve, as translator, wanted resolution, even if Gieve, as sadhaka, as seeker-practitioner, knew there could be none. When we met over coffee seven months before he died, I asked Gieve if he felt he had any unfinished business.