In this haunting piece for Public Books, Miadd Banki reflects on translating a Fernanda TrÃas collection into Persian as the internet went dark in Iran. As he attempts to work on the translation, he notices some disturbing parallels between the work on this desk and what he’s witnessed in his country in this war of choice.
I was hunched over the Spanish manuscript of Fernanda TrÃas’s collection, No soñarás flores (You Will Not Dream of Flowers). It was a cruel irony: While I struggled to find Persian words for TrÃas’s tales of quiet loss, the air outside was thick with the scent of gunpowder and the final breaths of a generation. Every time I hit a linguistic wall or a cultural nuance that required a quick online search, I would instinctively glance at the laptop’s connection icon, only to be reminded of the void.
The lack of internet turned the act of translation into heavy, manual labor: a slow, agonizing crawl through sentences that felt less like fiction, and more like prophecies.
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