Translating the Unseen: Gaza’s Sky and Anne Carson’s Vision
By Alaa Alqaisi
It began with an email from Dr. James Heaney, a professor of English and Irish studies at Carlow University, requesting my help translating an Arabic text for his students to accompany their study of Wrong Norma, a 2024 work by Anne Carson. Carson—a poet of immense imaginative range, whose words ripple with mythic and philosophical undercurrents— was to be the cornerstone of the lesson. Yet, this text in Arabic, seemingly peripheral, emerged quietly within Carson’s reflections—written by Yemeni engineer and coauthor Faisal bin Ali Jaber—not as a mere footnote, but as a bridge, interrupting the abstract with something raw, something immediate, a bridge between Carson’s intellectual inquiry and the lived realities of war. The Arabic text was a meditation on war and its machinery, the faceless annihilation of modern violence. As I translated it into English, it became clear that this was no simple academic exercise. It was a confrontation with my own reality, as a translator living in Gaza, bearing witness to the truths the text articulated with almost unbearable precision.
The Arabic text, profoundly introspective, described a sky which underwent alchemical change, such that it no longer belonged to the realm of celestial beauty; instead, it had become mechanized and deathly—a conveyor belt for drones, bombs, and the faceless violence of modern warfare. These skies, once metaphors for freedom, had become heavy with the weight of human cruelty. As I read the text, I didn’t have to imagine its meaning. This sky was my own; the sky I live under in Gaza. Translating it was an act of reckoning with my reality. What does it mean to translate words about war when war shapes your daily life? As I translated, Carson’s voice—though absent from the Arabic original—seemed to loom over the text. Her ability to fragment and reassemble history, mythology, and emotion struck deeply here. The Arabic seemed to have been answering Carson’s implicit question: What does the facelessness of war do to the soul?
But herein lies the irony: Carson did not write this. The text was born in Arabic, in the rhythm and cadence of a vernacular that’s steeped in the life experience of human suffering. And yet, its journey to my hands felt circuitous and loaded. An Irishman, whose nation bears its own scars of colonial violence, asks a Palestinian translator in Gaza to translate an Arabic meditation into English, a language shaped as much by conquest as by poetry. This act of translation, then, was not merely a linguistic task; it was a negotiation of histories, identities, and traumas, all colliding on the page.
Wrong Norma opens with Carson’s “Lecture on the History of Skywriting,” co-written with Robert Currie and Faisal bin Ali Jaber, an engineer from Yemen whose nephew and brother-in-law were killed in a US drone strike in 2012. Although composed a decade earlier, it echoed the war in Gaza that began in 2023. In “Lecture on the History of Skywriting,” Carson interrogates the way humans have always tried to imprint their presence onto the sky, from early myths to the mechanics of skywriting. Gaza has always been a city of confinement, a narrow strip of land densely packed with nearly two million people, hemmed in by borders and the sea. There is no expansive nature to soften its hardness, no force or open fields to offer solace. Only the sea stretches out before us, endless and indifferent, and above it, the vast sky. I cannot count how many times I have stared at the sky, particularly while standing before the sea, drawn to the invisible line where they meet. I was always curious about that line, about what lay beyond it, about the world that existed past the horizon. The sky, in those moments, seemed boundless, a canvas for possibility. But now Gaza’s sky is no longer a canvas for myths or dreams. It is weaponized, heavy with drones and death. Carson asks what it meant to write on the sky; in my context, the question becomes, What does it mean to live beneath a sky turned into a weapon? Translating this text into English, to sit alongside Carson’s work, felt like threading two different but deeply intertwined realities.
Anne Carson’s works often explore fragmentation in terms of language, time, and humanity. Her poetry lingers in places where meaning breaks down, leaving silence to take over. This Arabic text felt as if it were a response to her silences, refusing to let the faceless go unnamed; it resisted erasure and insisted on bearing witness. But translating it into English, the language that leans toward abstraction, was a delicate task. Arabic carries its weight differently; it’s rooted in rhythm, layered in meaning, and resistant to facelessness. English, with its grammatical economy, can smooth over the jagged edges of Arabic’s emotional density. How does one render the philosophical weight of this meditation on war as a continuum, a thread that binds human history together in blood and ash? These were not linguistic questions; they were moral ones. So I had the responsibility to ensure that the rawness of the original survived the journey into Carson’s intellectual universe.
As I worked, I could not stop thinking about the students who would read this text alongside Carson’s work. Would they see the parallels between Carson’s fragmented modernity and the Arab writer’s relentless witness to war? Would they notice the connections between an Irish professor, a Palestinian translator, and the shared human experience of violent conflict? Would they see Gaza in the text? I imagined their discussions, their interpretations, and I wondered if they could feel the weight of these words. Or would distance—geographical, linguistic, emotional—render the text too abstract, too distant from their lives?
Anne Carson once wrote, “words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.” As I worked on this translation, her observation became uncomfortably real. The words didn’t sit passively on the page; they pushed back. They demanded to be carried, to be heard, to move between English and Arabic, between Yemen and Gaza and Carlow. They forced themselves into spaces that might prefer silence, bouncing across borders and languages, pressing their weight into every corner of understanding. Yet, as they moved, I couldn’t help but wonder: what did they truly accomplish? Did they change anything, or did they simply echo the same unbearable truths in a new form?
When the translation was done, I sat quietly for a long time. I was distracted by how strange it was. The text about faceless war had brought so many faces into view: the writer’s, the professor’s, the students’, my own. And as I sat, I realized I wasn’t just a translator in this process. I was a witness, carrying the weight of a story that felt both deeply personal and painfully universal. The words had crossed borders, traversed languages, but I was left questioning their impact. Does translating the realities of war make them more bearable, or does it simply reshape them into something easier to consume from safer places? In rendering this sky into English, into a language of distance and abstraction, did I preserve its unbearable weight—or did I risk reducing it, smoothing its jagged edges for those who will never be beneath its destruction?
I don’t have the answers. What I do know is this: the sky remains—vast, faceless and unforgiving. It looms above, a silent witness and an unrelenting weapon, indifferent to our attempts to capture its meaning. It watches us as we write, translate, and struggle to articulate the weight of what it has become, and so I am left with one unshakeable question: When language breaks beneath the enormity of war, how do we find the words—or the strength— to carry on?
Alaa Alqaisi is a Palestinian translator, writer, and researcher from Gaza, deeply passionate about literature, language, and the power of storytelling to bridge cultures and bear witness to lived realities.