If language constantly signifies something “quite other than what it says” as Jacques Lacan suggests, then translation is also perpetually mediated between the ‘translatable’ and ‘untranslatable.’ This Lacanian idea is on display in Somaya Ramadan’s novel Awr?q al-narjis, where language is an ambiguous power that dominates the protagonist Kimi, cloistering her within a claustrophobic, interior world. The constant tension between the ambiguity and fluency of language is reflected within Awr?q al-narjis and is the driving force behind its narrative. Kimi herself oscillates between feeling utterly betrayed by language and completely dependent on it to save her from her tormentors. Constructed primarily as an interior narrative/monologue, the novel centers on Kimi’s preoccupation with language’s unpredictability—its potential to give life and its ability to take it away simultaneously. This paper develops a reading of Ramadan’s text that attempts to locate the connections, relations and tensions engendered between the Arabic and the English language in the narrative’s meditations on linguistic and translational duality. My analysis will consider translation as an equally dualistic process and will operate on two levels. The first is to locate moments in the text where Ramadan meditates on the failure of language to capture dualisms. For example, Ramadan assigns the word rahma (mercy) to the concept of ‘izraïl (angel of death) where this linguistic and conceptual double is usually lacking (i.e. in Arabic, ‘izraïl has no linguistic counterpart). The second level is to then analyze moments in the text where translation tensions appear by studying Ramadan’s text alongside Marilyn Booth’s translation, Leaves of Narcissus. This analysis of translation as an internal process to the text (Ramadan) and also external to it (Booth) will be investigated through Lacan’s concept of the inherent ambiguity of language. Reading these texts side-by-side will allow me to locate the interplay between the communicative and non-communicative aspects of language as important sites of conflict in the text. In conclusion, I will attempt to theorize how translation mediates sites of conflict by unsettling the illusion of coherence between languages and the presumption that a principle of equivalence underwrites acts of translation.