Translator’s Notes
January 17, 2025 at 01:27AMIn this deeply personal essay for Words Without Borders, translator Nathan H. Dize considers the stunning, emotional parallels between his real-life experiences and the works of fiction he’s translating. In using his work as a mechanism to connect with his mother and better understand family secrets, he seems drawn to projects with characters whose physical and mental health challenges mirror those of his extended family.
You get out of bed, make yourself a coffee, and settle down on the couch to read a section of the book you are translating. You are reminded of your dream instantly, as the mother of one of the children in the novel succumbs to a respiratory illness in the middle of the night. Her daughter awakens to find her blue, stiff, and shimmering in the early morning light.
You cannot stop thinking about the coincidence as you stare at the page, blankly scanning the words. Your grandmother died of stage four lung cancer nearly a year ago, and now here you are, reading a passage you will have to translate about a mother dying of a respiratory disease. You can hardly make it through a paragraph.
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The Shapes of Grief
“Witnessing the unbearable.”
Grief Guides
“Maybe end of life doulas can only make bad deaths better.”
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/01/16/translators-notes/
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