1)

““A brown egg on a blue plate one early morning.”

It appears in the middle of a long list of everything a bomb destroys, and that is exactly why it stops you cold. Everything else in the list has a kind of expected weight: parks, schools, orchards, parents, children. But a brown egg on a blue plate is so small and so ordinary that it feels almost embarrassing to grieve. And yet it’s the detail that breaks you, because it’s the kind of thing you would never think to remember until it’s gone. Mounzer seems to understand that war isn’t only the loss of enormous things. It’s the loss of a quiet morning before anyone was awake, when everything was still whole.

2)

“My English is a war wound.”

Four words. She’s saying that even the language she uses to tell these stories was taken from her, not freely chosen. She was made to feel Arabic was lesser and English more worthy. So the language she writes in is itself evidence of a colonial wound. What struck me is how many people across the world write and dream in a language imposed on them through shame or violence, and are expected to be grateful for it. Fluency, she’s saying, can be a form of loss disguised as a gift.

3)

In the article, the author explains that when she translates the stories of Syrian women, she often has to write their experiences in the first person and use the word “I.” This means she temporarily speaks in their voice while telling their story in another language.

When a translator writes someone else’s story using “I,” does it help readers feel closer to the person who lived the experience, or does it risk changing the story in some way? How can a translator stay faithful to someone’s voice while still making the story understandable in another language?