On the Other End of Translation

After Kaveh Akbar’s “Reading Farrokhzad in a Pandemic”

By Elina Katrin

My jiddo’s smile is a purple fig 
sliced open. 

Poor video chat connection doesn’t stop
him from telling me, anti helwa,
and I see that to him I am pretty
despite dead pixels and distance.

#

Syria – Russia – America

In a three-way call my father loses track
of languages, and in this orchard of words 
I can’t harvest enough Arabic phrases.

Here: ana ohebek.
Here: mechtektlak kthyr.

I can’t scrape off the hardened glue
of Arabic from the tip of my tongue,
can’t pull out the rope of right words 
stuck down my throat. 

#

أتمنى أن أعيش حتى اليوم الذي أراك فيه شخصيًا
Я надеюсь, я доживу до того дня, когда увижу тебя лично.
I hope I live till the day I see you in person.

My jiddo says. My father translates. I translate.
I am at loss.

#

My jiddo knows the feeling like the weight 
of ripe fruit on his farmer’s palm.

His wife, my teta, dead four months ago.
Sons refugeed in a foreign land.
His brothers killed, some jailed.

The loss is stuck to his unstable teeth,
sealed in calluses on his fingers,
pressed against his abdomen,
a burst appendix.

So much of the fig is seeds.
So much of his smile is gone.

#

My jiddo is as soft as an old plum, as sincere
as a tear when he says

أتمنى أن أعيش حتى اليوم الذي أراك فيه شخصيًا

These words might be wrong.

I can’t read Arabic. I can’t write.

Google Translate reduces all Arabic dialects
into one language selection, and this choice
is the one I have to trust.

#

Ya Allah, let there be room to feel in a language
without speaking it.

Here: ana ohebek.
Here: mechtektlak kthyr.

Take these words. Enhance their meaning.
Multiply. Multiply.