In 1991, just as I had laboriously translated these lines in a dusty Cambridge classroom, thinking more of grammar than meaning, my Classics teacher glanced out of the window and commented that the passage made her think of the two million refugees that were then in the news, pouring out of the former Yugoslavia into refugee camps. I can recall staring at her in amazement, as the distant past, my mother’s recent past, and the many, distressing stories I had heard about it, collided with current events. I was not conscious of it at the time, but as the child of a refugee, the profound trauma, isolation and dislocation of my mother’s experience had seeped into and coloured nearly every aspect of my life. There had been little space for anything else. Reading the Aeneid, I glimpsed a chink of light, a perspective on that experience, the magnitude of which had been impossible to grasp. I had spent 17 years growing up a stranger to myself, my conscious and unconscious experience filled with the repetition of the unprocessed and traumatic experiences of others. In different ways, I spent the next 20 years swimming around the iceberg; trying to probe its shape and explore its effects on the currents of water around it. In this piece I will try to convey what an immense task this was.

中文翻译：

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迷失在翻译中：难民童年的回声

1991 年，就​​在我在布满灰尘的剑桥教室里费力地翻译这些句子时，更多地考虑语法而不是意义，我的古典老师瞥了一眼窗外评论说，这段话让她想起了当时在那里的两百万难民。消息，从前南斯拉夫涌入难民营。我记得我惊讶地盯着她看，因为遥远的过去，我母亲最近的过去，以及我听说过的许多令人痛苦的故事，与时事发生了冲突。当时我并没有意识到这一点，但作为难民的孩子，我母亲经历的深刻创伤、孤立和错位几乎渗透并影响了我生活的方方面面。几乎没有空间放其他东西。阅读埃涅阿斯纪，我瞥见一丝曙光，对那次经历的看法，其规模是无法把握的。我花了 17 年的时间成长为一个对自己陌生的人，我有意识和无意识的经历充满了他人未经处理的创伤经历的重复。在接下来的 20 年里，我以不同的方式在冰山周围游泳；试图探测它的形状并探索它对周围水流的影响。在这篇文章中，我将尝试传达这是一项多么艰巨的任务。