There is a particular kind of silence in an accelerator control room at three in the morning.
The machines hum. The screens glow. The beam circulates — millions of times per second, invisible, impossibly fast, guided by magnets tuned to the precision of a second decimal place. My colleagues are focused. The room smells of coffee and concentration.
And somewhere in my mind, below the equations, below the interface, a line of Hafez is turning over.
Yar-e man baash — be my companion.
I did not choose to carry two worlds. The carrying happened to me. I left Iran because I wanted to study the physics of particle accelerators — an obscure, beautiful, deeply impractical obsession. I ended up in Europe, in a country where I learned the language from scratch, in a field where most people had never met an Iranian.
The Translator’s Life
The strange thing about living between two languages, two cultures, two ways of being in the world, is that you become permanently bilingual — not just in language, but in understanding.
I see Iranian things through European eyes and European things through Iranian eyes. Neither perspective is entirely comfortable. Neither is entirely wrong.
When my Italian partner asks me what ‘jaanam’ means, I say: ‘It means my soul. Or my life. Or my darling. It depends on who says it and how.’ And then I say: ‘There is no English word for it.’ And then we sit together in the silence of an untranslatable word, which is itself a kind of intimacy.
Why I Started Teaching Persian
The story of Rostam and Sohrab was the moment something changed.
I was telling my partner this story — the hero who doesn’t know his own son, the son who dies before the father can acknowledge him — and I watched the Italian eyes fill with something I recognized. Recognition. The oldest human emotion: the feeling that a story has always been yours, you just didn’t know it yet.
I thought: if I can make that happen — if I can make someone feel that a Persian story belongs to them — then I have done something real in the world. Something more permanent than a corrected beam orbit.