There is no definitive way to write, not only one language to choose from. However, as I've established my writing habits and style, I've nonetheless locked myself in one narrative structure. It is when I started to really think about what grounds translation covers that I started to realize that there can be other options.

Translation is not simply transferring a word from one language to
another but what that transference entails. We simply cannot take a word out of its context and hope it works just as well somewhere else. Words can be translated into English, but context and sentiments that another language carries cannot. We simply have to know the culture, to be born into the language, in order to understand everything-and even then, we cannot fully grasp everything.

Language is what we as human have created in order to have a loved one understand us, to convey angry thoughts when others have left us high and dry, to articulate what a tiny bear cub rolling down a grass-covered hill in spring is like (quote Murakami from Norwegian Wood), how that cherry blossom smells on the walk from home... and to be limited to expressing all those feelings in one language only creates a sadness. Like Keats and his Elgin marbles.

Translation simply cannot be perfect. At least not now. What it does is it mainly gives us access to stories that happened outside of the English-speaking world. Tales that took place in different worlds. It is as easy for the American readers to deny the existence of these other worlds as to forget the fact that translation, for now, is merely a tool, a telescope that lets us in on a look outside of—and often far from—the American narrative. But what we see through the telescope is never clear. It is still the real thing, but it loses focus and gets blurred.

Instead, translation is a mindset, a mode of thinking. It is a reminder that, even though we are lucky enough to read a story that happened in a foreign place, we will never be able to get the story in its entirety. "Something is always already lost in translation." Although I dislike this saying—it's like we've already given up on the attempt to know more, this mode of thinking humbles us as readers and as writers.

Translation invites us to acknowledge, to study, to feel, and to never assume. Ignorance is not bliss in the world of translation, because there should not be a hierarchy of languages, one is not superior to another—Nothing should be italicized—and the most bliss we can feel when reading a work of translation is to think about what is lost: How can we close the gap between understanding and the lack thereof? What can we do to respect another culture? What are we butchering when we bring into English the story of another culture? What can we gain from the loss?