This article is an extended and slightly revised version of the essay which first appeared in English in Adi Magazine in July 2025, reprinted and translated in Encounters with permission.

Introduction

This essay was written in Gaza, in a space where life itself is translated daily into the language of survival. To write and to translate under siege is to inhabit a double life: one lived amid ruins, scarcity, and relentless violence, and another carried on in words that attempt to cross borders and address an unseen reader. In this context, translation emerges less as a mechanical operation than as a mode of bearing witness, an ethics of presence that seeks, however precariously, to carry voices extinguished by bombardment into other spaces of reception.

When I first set down these reflections, I did not anticipate the journey they would take. To witness them now carried into Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Korean, Kurdish, Norwegian, Persian, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Urdu, and Arabic is to be reminded that language—unlike people—cannot be besieged. Words refuse enclosure. They move with unexpected freedom, weaving tenuous but necessary bridges between fractured geographies.

I now write this note from Ireland, a very different landscape, but the essay remains anchored in Gaza’s ruins and its unyielding memory. It speaks not only of my own experience but of a collective condition: the translator as witness, compelled to navigate between wounds and words, between the untranslatable and the imperative to translate.

This piece should be read, then, not simply as autobiography or reportage, but as an inquiry into the politics of language in times of catastrophe. It asks what it means to carry meaning across divides, and whether translation might serve, however provisionally, as a mode of resistance against erasure and a safeguard for human presence.

The translator as a witness to vanishing worlds

To be a Palestinian translator is to become an intermediary between a vanishing world and one that often refuses to acknowledge its disappearance. It is to carry voices across the abyss of silence; to smuggle meaning past the barricades of linguistic and political distortion; to refuse the obliteration of one’s history by ensuring that its words do not die with its people. The translator does not merely transcribe words—they archive loss, document erasure, and ensure that even the most fragile whisper of testimony reaches the world beyond the siege.

In present-day Gaza, especially, translation is not just an intellectual exercise. It is a means of survival and a weapon against amnesia. To translate from Gaza is to chronicle not only genocide, but also the mundane moments of life that war seeks to erase: the scent of orange blossoms before an airstrike, the call to prayer drifting over a city that might not exist by morning, a child’s voice reciting poetry in a classroom that may soon be destroyed. These details resist the dehumanization of the siege, refusing to allow Gaza to exist solely as an abstraction of suffering.

In his essay “The task of the translator,” Walter Benjamin once wrote that true translation gives a text an afterlife—not simply carrying meaning, but ensuring the survival of the original. But what does an afterlife mean, when the original has been buried in rubble? When the poet has been assassinated; when the home has been destroyed; when the writer of the text may no longer be alive to see their words cross the threshold into another language? For the Palestinian translator, this question is not theoretical. It is urgent, pressing, and relentless. The stories I translate do not come from archives. They are pulled from the wreckage of homes, written in the spaces between airstrikes, and carried on the breath of those who may not live to tell them again.

The world has always demanded that Palestinians be translated before they can be heard. It has never been enough for a mother to scream her child’s name after an airstrike; her grief must first be softened, mediated, and made digestible for a world that would prefer its tragedies framed within humanitarian reports and passive-voiced headlines. But I know what happens when stories are left in their original form, and refuse the accommodation that translation sometimes demands. They are ignored. They are seen as too raw, too urgent, and too uncomfortable. The world will always choose familiar narratives that preserve its sense of stability rather than those that unsettle it with the full force of disruption. And so, translation becomes not only a necessity but an ethical battle: to find a language that resists both disappearance and domestication, allowing pain to remain unfiltered while still ensuring it crosses the linguistic checkpoints that decide which suffering is acknowledged, and which is discarded.

I have lived this tension in every story I have translated. As part of a collaborative book project for ArabLit, I worked on “نوارس تنتظر شاطئًا لا يصل” (Seagulls awaiting a shore that never comes) by Mohammed Taysir—a story that follows a displaced man watching a little girl pressed against her mother in the front seat of a livestock truck, her hair adorned with tiny flowers. In the original Arabic, her blue dress “almost blossomed”—a delicate verb, denoting a moment of arrested beauty crushed by the choking diesel smoke of the truck’s engine. Translating it, I hesitated. In English, the phrase risked losing its weight. In Arabic, it was clear: the dress, the child, the future. Everything had been denied its moment to bloom. But in English, could I trust the reader to feel that? Or would they skim over it, the way people skim over all tragedies that are not their own?

How does one render grief in a language that has been trained to neutralize it? How does one carry the truth of an obliterated home into the vocabulary of a world that has long since normalized its destruction? Every language has its limits, but English—particularly the English of mainstream media, diplomatic statements, and “both sides” narratives—has been carefully constructed to strip Palestinian suffering of its agency, reducing massacres to “flare-ups” and sieges to “security measures.” To translate Gaza into this language is to fight against the very structures that have been designed to obscure its reality. This is the exile of the Palestinian translator: to exist between two worlds, neither of which fully belongs to them.

And even as I translate, I know that language itself is an exile. I am caught between Arabic—the language of grief, intimacy, and untranslatable immediacy—and English, the language of diplomacy, distance, and neatly categorized violence. In Arabic, the weight of loss is clear. A mother does not “lose” a child; she is bereaved, devastated, undone. But in English, loss feels passive, clinical—something that simply happens. The bomb “targets,” the house “collapses,” the child “is killed” as if no one is responsible. To translate is to fight against these structures—to refuse the grammar of occupation, and force agency back into sentences designed to erase it.

The ethics of translating war

Translation has always been an act of treachery. The Italian phrase “traduttore, traditore” (translator, traitor) suggests that something is always lost, with meaning distorted in the transfer from one language to another. Similarly, in “The task of the translator,” Walter Benjamin speaks of translation as a process that necessarily transforms the original, with meaning never simply carried over but instead recreated, reconfigured, and reinterpreted. But for the Palestinian translator, the stakes of betrayal are far greater: translation is a battlefield over meaning, a fraught negotiation where every word becomes an ethical dilemma and every sentence, a confrontation with power. The betrayal inherent in translation is no longer a question of aesthetics or fidelity, but of survival.

To translate Gaza is to search not merely for the right words, but for the ears willing to receive them. The Palestinian translator occupies a space of unbearable tension—between the raw urgency of unmediated truth, and the tight thresholds of a global discourse conditioned to flinch. It is not enough to be accurate; grief must be shaped into a form that can pass through a world that has trained itself not to look. This is not a matter of linguistic conversion. It is an act of endurance; a labor of defiance. The task is not simply to find language, but to preserve devastation without letting it be defanged—without letting the violence that shatters a home become a metaphor, or a child’s death become a statistic. Translation, here, becomes a form of resistance: a way of carrying memory into a world eager to forget, of insisting that even if the original is untranslatable in its pain, it must still be heard.

Few understood this burden more intimately than the late Refaat Alareer—poet, professor, and editor—whose life and work embodied the urgency of refusing silence. A leading literary voice from Gaza, Alareer was not only a writer of extraordinary clarity, but a curator of voices too often muted by the fog of war and the filters of media. In his groundbreaking anthology Gaza writes back, he did not assemble stories to soften Gaza’s image or package it for international sympathy. Instead, he offered something much riskier: direct, unapologetic proximity. The writers he brought together were not translating themselves for the comfort of others; they were claiming narrative space that had long been denied them. Their stories refused the vocabulary of humanitarianism, with its passive voice and safety. They spoke not in abstraction, but in the sharp language of immediacy: of homes shelled while children slept, of lovers separated by checkpoints, of dreams interrupted by drone fire. Alareer’s editorial vision did not aestheticize Gaza’s pain or seek to universalize it through metaphor. Instead, it insisted on the right to speak plainly, to document without distortion, and to refuse the expectation that Palestinian grief be repackaged to be understood. His conviction was clear: Palestinian writers do not need to translate their realities into something more acceptable, they need only to be heard on their own terms. His Palestinian narratives were not raw data for political argument or humanitarian pity; they were literature, urgent, and unignorable.

What made Alareer’s work indispensable was not that it made Gaza more legible to the world; it was that it made evasion impossible. His narratives did not ask to be understood on foreign terms. They demanded to be encountered on their own. And it is for this, perhaps, that he was targeted. His assassination was not only the killing of a beloved writer and educator. It was a targeted strike against language itself—a deliberate attempt to extinguish the voice of a people who refuse to be silenced. But Alareer’s work endures. Each translated line, each page carried beyond the blockade, is an act of refusal. And not just against forgetting—but against the terms on which Palestine has long been forced to speak.

The stakes of translation extend beyond Gaza and Palestine—into the broader struggles of the colonized and exiled, where language has always been a terrain of conflict. In his book Reflections on exile, the Palestinian intellectual Edward Said wrote that exile is not merely a condition of displacement, but a “contrapuntal awareness”: a state of being in which one must move between multiple worlds, holding in tension the longing for a lost homeland, and the necessity of articulating that loss in languages that are not one’s own. The Palestinian translator occupies this same space of rupture, straddling the chasm.

Yet translation is not only a record of loss; it is also an act of reclamation, a refusal to allow language to be dictated by the occupier. The work of translation—particularly from Arabic to English—is inherently political because it disrupts the linguistic hierarchies that dictate which voices are heard and which are silenced. Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry, when translated, does not merely bring Palestinian suffering into the realm of global literature; it defies the structures that attempt to confine Palestinian identity to the margins. “Where should we go after the last border?” he asks in Earth presses against us—a question that haunts every displaced people, and every exile whose existence is defined by borders they did not choose. The translator—in carrying these words across languages—ensures that the question remains unanswered and continues to reverberate, demanding a response from a world that prefers to ignore it.

But there is a kind of struggle implicit in this attempt. The very act of translating Palestinian narratives into English—the language of former colonial rulers and media outlets that frame Israeli occupation as “conflict,” as well as a language that has long been a tool of empire—raises uncomfortable questions. Can the language of the oppressor ever fully contain the truth of the oppressed? Does English flatten the depth of Palestinian grief, strip it of its urgency, or render it too abstract? The scholar Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, in Decolonising the mind, argues that language is not neutral, so that to write in the colonizer’s language is to fight within a structure designed to distort and suppress. The Palestinian translator must therefore wage a constant battle: to subvert, reshape, and smuggle meaning through the cracks of an imperial language that was never meant to carry it.

The translator’s dilemma: who listens?

The most painful question I ask myself is not whether I should translate, but whether anyone is listening. I think of Elias Khoury’s Gate of the sun, where the storyteller speaks to a man in a coma, telling him the history of Palestine as if the words themselves might bring him back to life. This is what translation sometimes feels like—speaking into the void, narrating loss to a world that remains unmoved. As a Palestinian translator, I am always aware of how my words will be received, balancing between telling the truth and ensuring the truth is heard.

Palestinians translate because we must—because silence is the final stage of erasure. But translation is not a neutral act—it is fraught with the violence of power. The Palestinian translator does not merely contend with linguistic challenges; they struggle against the structures that determine whether their words will be heard, distorted, or ignored. I’ve seen how English-language headlines reduce the bombing of a refugee camp to “an airstrike killing civilians”—a phrase that erases agency and responsibility. And I know that when I sit down to translate a testimony or a short story from Arabic into English, I am not translating into a blank space; I am translating into a discourse already shaped by euphemism and avoidance. The ethical dilemma is real: to stay true to the original Arabic, I must often confront the norms of ‘neutral’ English, which prefers passivity over clarity and victimhood over resistance. If I render the voice as it is—angry, accusatory, precise—I risk having the translation dismissed as too political or biased. But if I temper that voice, I risk reproducing the very structures that silence us. I walk a tightrope between erasure and accusation—trying to preserve the truth in a language that is not always prepared to receive it.

And so, I exist in what W.E.B. Du Bois described as a state of “double consciousness”—with an awareness of how one is seen through the eyes of the world, alongside an awareness of an internal self that the world refuses to acknowledge. The Palestinian translator inhabits two realms but is fully accepted in neither: they are too embedded in the immediacy of war to adopt the detached neutrality expected of them, yet too distanced by the demands of translation to fully live within the rawness of that suffering. In translating Gaza, one must translate one’s own pain while performing the impossible task of making it legible to those who will never fully comprehend it.

The question lingers: who is listening? Do these words, carried across linguistic and cultural borders, land anywhere beyond the chambers of those who already know and grieve? Or are they consumed as spectacle, as tragedy—as yet another entry in the archive of Palestinian suffering that the world observes with pity, but no action? The Palestinian translator clings to the belief that as long as the words remain, the names are spoken, and the poems are recited, then Gaza has not been erased. Yet the fear remains: is the world willing to hear, or are we only speaking into an echo chamber of grief?

During the war on Gaza, I translated voices that would have otherwise been lost—words that, had they remained in Arabic alone, might never have reached beyond the rubble from which they emerged. In the same collection where a girl’s dress almost blossomed before being stilled by smoke, another child dreams of being washed clean alongside her family’s laundry. Fatima Hassouna’s “لارغبةَ لي بالحلمِ الآن، ولا رغبةَ لي بالمدينة” (I have no wish to dream anymore) moves differently—it shifts between surrealism and reality, domestic familiarity and existential dread. Her protagonist, caught between dream and waking life, wonders whether she, too, can be thrown into the washing machine that her mother loads with clothes. She longs to be cleansed of war, to be wrung out like a soaked shirt. The childlike innocence of believing that even a washing machine might cleanse her of the stains of war is met with the crushing truth that no machine, no mother’s hands, can undo what has been done. Working on this piece, I wrestled with the final lines: “The world, once so small in my hands, has slipped through my fingers. And in some dream—I don’t know which—I lost the life I once knew.” It was not just about finding the right words, but about transmitting the weight of what the sentence refused to say. I asked myself: could English carry the sheer physicality of Arabic, the way it demands embodiment? Would the weight of that metaphor remain intact, or would it dissolve into something too abstract, too distant?

When I first wrote this piece in English, Fatima Hassouna was still alive. Her words rang out, her voice rising from within our scorched city, bearing witness and refusing to be erased. But now, as I translate my own article into Arabic to accompany this version for Encounters, I do so with the crushing knowledge that Fatima has been killed by the Israeli occupation. This translation no longer became a mere act of linguistic rendering; it became a mirror of a recurring tragedy: the annihilation of the person while their words alone are left to defy erasure. This is what it means to live a Palestinian life in Gaza, a life not only haunted by the threat of losing our language, but by the relentless loss of ourselves, one after another. Today, I write about Fatima. Tomorrow, these words may be all that remain of me, should I too be killed as she was. And perhaps one day, someone will grieve for me, as I now grieve for her, silently, inwardly, with a heart too full for speech.1

These stories do not merely document war; they ask questions that have no answers and ache in the bones of every displaced Palestinian. Taysir’s wandering protagonist, for instance, asks, “Was Gaza ever this beautiful? Or do the displaced always romanticize what they have lost?” In this, he captures the cruel paradox of exile: to lose a place is to see it with a clarity that was never possible while still inhabiting it. Likewise, Hassouna’s dreamer—who wakes only to find herself in yet another displacement—embodies the endless cycle of flight and return, of longing for a home that is always just beyond reach. In translating these stories, I was not merely swapping the text from Arabic to English—I was fighting against the structural barriers that dictate what is ‘acceptable’ Palestinian suffering. A translation that is too visceral, too humanizing, too direct, runs the risk of being discarded as political rhetoric, while a translation that is too subdued risks contributing to the very erasure it seeks to prevent. This is the impossible paradox of the Palestinian translator: to translate faithfully is to risk invisibility, but to translate strategically is to risk distortion.

And so I return to the beginning. Not to where this essay started, but to where every act of Palestinian translation begins: with the unbearable knowledge that the world might never truly listen, and the unbearable refusal to let that silence have the final word. To translate from Gaza is to walk a bridge built from broken syntax and broken lives, carrying stories that are too heavy to be borne and too sacred to be dropped. It is to speak into a wind that rarely answers, to whisper names that echo back only to the one who dared to speak them. And still, I speak. I translate, not because I believe the world will change, but because not translating would be to surrender—to declare that the girl whose dress almost blossomed never existed, that the mother clutching her child in the front seat of a livestock truck was never real, that Fatima Hassouna’s desperate wish to be laundered clean of war was never uttered. I cannot let that happen. I cannot let their words dissolve into rubble.

As Dostoevsky wrote, “In thousands of agonies—I exist.” I exist in those agonies too—not only as a witness, but as a vessel. A voice. And if the stories I carry are not always welcomed—if they are met with indifference or rejection—I will still carry them, because their very telling is resistance. Because to name the dead is to resist their disappearance. Because to write a sentence about Gaza in English is to defy the architectures of global indifference. And because, like one of Shakespeare’s oppressed heroines, I know that “my tongue will tell the anger of my heart. Or else my heart, concealing it, will break.”

I do not know if the world will ever truly listen. I do not know if these words will land anywhere beyond the echo chambers of those who already grieve. But I know this: if the stories of Gaza are waiting to be carried across the abyss, then I will carry them. If the seagulls are still waiting for a shore, then I will continue writing them into existence.