This article brings together theories of both real and literary animals’ readability within Animal Studies and of untranslatability within comparative literature more broadly. Through a focus on Ibrāhīm al-Kūnī’s al-Tibr, in comparison with Mahasweta Devi’s ‘Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay and Pirtha’, I read the central human-animal encounters through both their cultural specificity and the wider ‘animal tropes’ to which they point, situating them within local tradition and the flows of world literature. I then shift to an examination of how both texts, through interspecies encounter, theorize the very processes of readability and comparability which they invite. Animals, I suggest, emerge as sites of ‘secrets’, hinting at the dictates of censorship as they shield symbolic import, or at the local which must be preserved from appropriation, and, above all, at a dimension of ‘otherness’ which can never be fully grasped. In al-Tibr, I examine this through a reading of the camel as ‘āya’ (sign), a central term within Arabic cosmology, and, in ‘Pterodactyl’, through Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s influential reading of ‘ethical singularity’ in the story.