Rabih Alameddine’s novel An Unnecessary Woman (2014) tells the story of Aaliya Saleh, a seventy-two-year-old woman living in Beirut as she reflects on a lifetime spent translating some thirty-seven novels from various European languages into Arabic. The introverted and erudite Aaliya spends her life voluntarily isolated from her outside world as she produces translations which she then packs into shoeboxes and stores in the maid’s bathroom. The invisibility of the process of translation and its products, therefore, is central in this fictional autobiography of a translator. By directly and explicitly engaging with Walter Benjamin and using specific examples of translation practices outside of the novel, Alameddine’s work extends beyond the expectations of its ostensible genre and becomes a commentary on translation. The character of Aaliya, furthermore, emerges as a metaphor for the invisible translator who, despite producing textual afterlives, remains invisible In this paper, I read An Unnecessary Woman as a literary historiography of the reception and place of Arabic within the canon of world literature and as an allegory of the (Arab) translator’s invisibility. I argue that the novel’s intertextual engagement with European literature and translation theory (specifically Walter Benjamin’s) can be read as literary metacommentary on the exclusion of the Arabic translator and her products as well as on the literary interactions of Arabic and other languages. Alameddine’s allegorical project, I further argue, is an adaptation of the ethos of classical Arabic commentary in which the novel’s numerous metaphoric elements together present a treatise on the relationship of Arabic to English and French. Read in this way, An Unnecessary Woman is a necessary allegory of language politics. In working toward this reading, this paper interrogates Alameddine’s text in relation to three problematics or concepts: 1) Frederic Jameson’s National Allegory; 2) Julia Kristeva’s reflections on the concept of the Silent Polyglot; and 3) Abdelfattah Kilito’s reading of authorship and translation in classical Arabic literary culture. My interpretive framework places Jameson, Kristeva, and Kilito in conversation with each other to produce a reading of Alameddine in which silence at the level of character and authorial commentary can be understood as generic concern or national allegorical expression.