Some words cross borders and open a window, others cross them and open the door to a prison cell. Between the window and the cell stands the translator, not as a neutral conduit who merely replaces one word with another, but as a partner in the fate that awaits a text once it leaves its first language.

I believe translation is one of the most beautiful ways human beings have devised to keep us from remaining prisoners of our own languages. Through translation, a poem reaches a reader whose existence the poet never knew of, the memory of one people passes into another culture; and a person recognises themselves in a story written far away. Yet I have also learned that this crossing is not always safe, and that the translation which gives a text another life may strip it of its first life if it fails to preserve its voice and context.

Translation is not a mirror that reflects a text exactly as it is. Every language carries its own history, imagery, and ways of naming things. What appears to be a simple word in a dictionary may carry an entire memory within the writer’s culture. It is therefore not enough for a translator to know two languages; they must also know something of the two lives inhabiting them, and hear both what the words say and what they leave unspoken.

The matter becomes even more delicate when the text is poetry. Meaning in a poem does not reside in words alone, but also in rhythm, pauses, metaphor, ambiguity, and the hidden bond between a word and a collective memory. For a Palestinian, a word such as land, return, or martyr may carry layers that no direct dictionary equivalent can convey. If a translator chooses one meaning and closes off all other possibilities, they may turn the poem into a different text, even when each individual word appears correct.

I do not write this as a theoretical proposition. I have experienced firsthand how a single translation can alter the course of a human life. My poem “Resist, My People, Resist Them” was carried from Arabic into Hebrew by a police translator who failed to preserve its poetic and political context, reshaping it instead according to his own beliefs and interpretation. In translation, the poem became a text that bore my name but not my voice. That version was used as evidence in a long trial, during which I paid with three years of my freedom in Israeli occupation prisons.

I found myself defending a meaning I had not written and words that were no longer fully mine. The error in translation was no longer a literary matter that could be corrected in a later edition, it had become evidence in a security file, capable of determining my fate. That was when I understood that a bad translation does not merely harm a text, it can destroy the life of its author.

In a colonial context, words do not move between two equal languages. One side controls the police, the courts, the prisons, the media, and the official narrative; the other can reach these institutions only through the language of power. When a Palestinian poem is translated through a security lens that searches for an accusation before it searches for meaning, metaphor becomes suspicious, anger becomes incitement, and a poetic call becomes a direct command.

Poetry, by its nature, resists a single meaning, while the security establishment demands that every word perform only one function. A phrase is torn from the poem, and the poem from its historical moment; the translation is then presented as the final truth. If the writer objects, they find themselves required to prove their innocence of a text they never wrote, while the translation acquires greater authority than the original. In this way, their right to their own language is confiscated twice: first when it is mistranslated, and again when they are denied the right to explain it.

This is why I do not view translation in court as a simple technical task. It is testimony that may determine a human being’s fate. The original text must remain present; the translation should be reviewed by more than one independent translator; a literary expert should be consulted when the text is poetry; and the writer must be granted the right to challenge what has been attributed to them. A single translator’s reading must never become a verdict on a poet’s intentions.

After my experience, I went through a painful period with everything related to translation. It was difficult to place my words in someone else’s hands again. When I needed to have some of my poems translated into Swedish, the trauma returned with twice its force: I did not know the language and could not review the text myself. I feared losing authority over my own words and once again seeing my name above a text that did not resemble what I had written.

But the first email I received from the translator Anna Jansson began to change something within me. She did not send me a finished translation. Instead, she sent questions about the poem, about words that could carry more than one meaning, and about the intention behind an image that no dictionary alone could explain. I began to feel reassured that my words were in the hands of a translator searching for the meaning closest to my intention, rather than the easiest or quickest one. The old memory did not disappear, but her questions opened the first crack in the wall of mistrust.

My understanding of translation changed further through my friendship with Malin Nord, with whom I developed a profound human bond and a strong friendship. We worked together on translating a play I had written about important and complex stages of my life, and later on several of my poems. Malin did not simply translate; through her questions, she excavated the layers hidden beneath the text.

Whenever she encountered a word that came from my Palestinian culture and seemed unfamiliar within her own, she would stop and ask: When do we use this word? What does it mean to us beyond its immediate definition? In what atmosphere was the poem born? When did I write it, for whom, and what was happening within and around me at the time?

I know that translators do not usually enter into everything that lies behind the scenes of a poem, and that a poet may not wish to disclose such a private space. But I came to believe that our path toward a translation that approached the spirit of the original had to pass through trust. I answered Malin’s questions not because the poem required a complete explanation, but because the translator needed to know the land and environment from which its words had grown.

What enabled my poems to enter another culture and receive such a response from Swedish audiences was not merely the transfer of their apparent meaning, but an understanding of what lay behind them. What lies behind a poem is what first inspired it and guided me to choose one image over another, or a word carrying a memory that does not appear in any dictionary. At times, we searched for a long while for a Swedish word capable of carrying all of this. At other times, we decided to keep the word in its Palestinian Arabic original, because translating it might make it superficially understandable while stripping it of its cultural body.

Whenever I heard the audience’s warm applause for the works in Swedish, I realised that translation was no longer a barrier between me and my listeners. It had become the means through which my message, and the message of my country and my Palestinian people, reached them. I began to see the translator anew: not as a potential danger to the text, but as a partner who gives it another life without severing its bond with its first language.

These two experiences taught me that fidelity in translation does not mean literalness. A word may be correct in the dictionary yet false in feeling or history. Fidelity means protecting the relationship between meaning, tone, and context. It means recognising that some words have no complete equivalent, asking questions when one does not know, and preserving intentional ambiguity rather than resolving it according to one’s own opinion.

Yet translation does not take place outside structures of power. Some languages possess publishing houses, universities, and media institutions, while texts in other languages are allowed to cross only when they conform to the image others wish to see. I therefore believe that the translator’s responsibility extends beyond transferring speech. A translator must not turn the writer’s culture into decoration, soften the text’s anger to make it comfortable, or impose an interpretation that conforms to authority or to the reader’s expectations.

A translator does not need to adopt the writer’s position, but they do need integrity. They may disagree with the text, but they have no right to punish it within the translation. If an expression carries more than one possible meaning, the translator must preserve that possibility or make it explicit, rather than conceal their uncertainty inside a definitive formulation for which another human being may pay the price.

On International Translation Day, I think of the translators who grant books more than one life and carry poems to places their authors never imagined they would reach. I also think about the magnitude of the responsibility they bear. A translator carries more than a text: they carry a person’s name, a collective memory, and the image of an entire culture in the eyes of a reader who may have no other source through which to know it.

This is why I do not ask only whether the words of a translation are correct. I ask: Has the voice remained alive? Has the context been preserved? Has the translation brought one person closer to another, or surrendered them to a preconceived judgement? And what might happen to the author of the text if we get it wrong?

Translation is an act of drawing near, and every genuine act of drawing near requires care. It may be a hand extended to a writer across borders, opening a new space for their text. Or it may be a hand that tears the words from their mouth and then points to them as someone accused of saying what they never said.

Between these two hands, the ethics of translation are determined.

Good translation does not merely carry words; it carries their author’s right to them. That right may be the right to literature, culture, and communication. In some places, it may also be the right to freedom and life.

/Dareen Tatour
Palestine