Feeling in Farsi, Writing in English: On Translating Your Life From One Language to Another

March 05, 2025 at 12:29AM

For Literary Hub, Sahar Delijani confronts the linguistic betrayal she feels when writing in English about Iran, a country that she left as a child and hasn’t visited in 13 years. As a first-generation immigrant writer, she recalls the thrill of learning her first world in English as a girl in Tehran and the dissonance she felt on arriving in the US to discover her pronunciations were incorrect and that her comprehension suffered. As a writer, she interrogates the discord of attempting to write convincing characters, plots, and settings in a new language. “We take the language we have, with all its flaws and follies, all its loneliness and ambiguity, and make it our own,” she writes. “We use it in our own fierce, imperfect way to tell our stories, to claim them, as much ours as part of the greater narrative of that universal story that surrounds us all.”

But what happens to us—the writers—when we entrust our most intimate stories to an acquired language? How are we meant to master, almost cold-heartedly, the complex work of emotional translation?

When I was writing my debut novel, Children of the Jacaranda Tree, I decided that to stay true to the stories, I needed to imagine I was writing not in English, but in Farsi. I told myself that even though I was using English words to express my thoughts, I had to think in Farsi, to remember in Farsi, to imagine in Farsi. I had to see English only as a vessel—that even if the words were in English, the emotions behind them were rooted in Farsi. Only then, I believed, could I remain true to myself and to the stories I wanted to tell.

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from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/03/04/feeling-in-farsi-writing-in-english-on-translating-your-life-from-one-language-to-another/
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Feeling in Farsi, Writing in English: On Translating Your Life From One Language to Another