The German author Daniel Kehlmann recently invited me to Cologne for a talk about literature. As a guest lecturer at the University of Cologne, he could invite other authors to talk there about their work and contemporary letters.

Not only is Daniel Kehlmann a gifted novelist; he is the kind of person you would like to sit next to at a dinner party. I gladly accepted his invitation.

On a cold Sunday afternoon, I arrived at the main station in Cologne. A student—who was about to finish her M.A.—picked me up and brought me to my hotel.

That evening, a dinner party was planned. On the guest list were the other authors Mr. Kehlmann had invited to Cologne: the Albanian novelist, Ismael Kadare, and the English author, Adam Thirlwell.

In 2003, I had attended a festival in Tyrol. Mr. Kadare was present there, as well, and I remembered him as a silent and almost shy person.

This time he was much more talkative, thanks probably to Mr. Kehlmann’s charming questions. Over dinner, Mr. Kadare spoke openly about his life under the Albanian dictator, Enver Hoxha.

I was seated next to his German translator, who happened to be his interpreter for the festival as well. (Mr. Kadare speaks French and Albanian, but during his interviews, he prefers to speak Albanian.)

I have a weak spot for translators. They are often underpaid and they seldom get the attention they deserve. Too often, they are hardly even mentioned in the reviews of books in translation.

Joachim Röhm, Mr. Kadare’s translator, turned out to be a soft-spoken but fascinating man. Mr. Röhm, born in 1947, had moved to Albania together with his wife for idealistic reasons in 1977. As he told me over dinner, he used to be a Marxist and he and his wife were tired of handing out leaflets near factories in Germany.

“But why Albania?” I asked. “Even for a Marxist, that’s not the most obvious choice for a place to go in 1977.”

“Albania had invited us,” Mr. Röhm said.

In Albania, he taught himself Albanian. After three years there, he returned to Germany and started working in a factory.

In 1988, a small publishing house in Austria published Mr. Röhm’s first translation of a novel by Ismael Kadare.

After the fall of the Berlin wall, Mr. Röhm returned to Albania. This time he started a software company. He has two sons; they both married Albanian women.

When dinner was over, Mr. Kadare walked back to the hotel next to his translator.

One could sense a strange kind of friendship between the great author and his long-term translator. There was a story there, but I decided that one day Mr. Röhm himself would write it down.