A single conversation can change things.

It would be great if I woke up tomorrow and could speak Persian. Wouldn't you love to wake and have a language in your mind that wasn't there the night before?

It's the best motivation to have a particular beloved reader in mind! Because you feel this urgency that you really want somebody you care about to be able to experience a sentence the way you experienced it in another language.

I have a deep love for the art of translation, and I couldn't find a novel that captured the fascinating, reckless adventure of it as I'd experienced it, or portrayed translators as the passionate risk-takers that so many of the translators I know are. So I wrote the book I couldn't find.