Farah Haddad opened the evening with a stack of her grandmother’s letters, half in Arabic and half in a French that had softened with age. What followed was less a talk than a long, unhurried argument about what a translated sentence owes its original — and whether an artwork, like a letter, is allowed to mean something slightly different on its second reading.
Layla Nasser, a literary translator, pushed back on the idea that anything is ever truly lost. Tom Okafor, listening more than speaking for most of the night, offered the evening’s quietest line: that a house remembers a language even after everyone who spoke it has left the room.
“Every translation is a small grief and a small gift at the same time.”