Status Updates From River in an Ocean: Essays o...

Yasmine Haj's essay was so melodic. I would quote it all!!!
"Arabic is all the jokes we couldn't tell, the stories we couldn't share, or co-create. It is all the cities and towns we had to leave and resettle and rebuild. All the places we were forced to call home."

what a thoughtful first essay! reminds me to check in with myself as a translator more regularly ❤️

when a book on a niche topic (here, translation from a decolonial feminist perspective) feels like it was made for you >>>>

A human's first task is to translate. As infants, we breathe air and immediately translate. To survive, we translate. In different tones, an infant articulates hunger, distress, and fatigue. In turn, their caregivers experiment, juggle interpretations, understand, translate. Translation becomes a mutual undertaking—a habit both receivers develop and an art both ends finesse. - Yasmine Haj

“Edward Said asks: “Besides, what does it mean to be perfectly, in a completely equal way, bilingual?” Said rightly points out that the technical or linguistic analyses of bilingualism simply cannot deal with the aspect of actually living in, as opposed to simply “knowing” two languages from two different worlds or cultural contexts…[]” !!!!

“to preserve a text, a street, a tree in an act of translation, the latter must preserve its internal music— and, if it’s been annihilated, then act to revive it”