Jason's Story
Copyright© 2025 by writer 406
Chapter 6
The seminar was called “The Ambiguous Word: Translation, History, and the Dangers of Cultural Blindness.” It was a required course that Professor Williams taught every year for new graduate students.
She was a popular lecturer—a sharp-eyed, slender, middle-aged woman with a sunny smile who favored the Socratic practice of dialogue over traditional lecturing.
Professor Williams went around the room and asked for practical examples of cultural blindness. As usual, Jason made it a point to keep his mouth shut. His experience was so vastly different from the others that he almost always felt out of place in discussions like this.
“Mr. Stone, you must have seen quite a few examples of this phenomenon.”
“Actually, I can give you a pretty good example,” he said.
The class leaned in slightly. This mysterious, good-looking guy never talked about his own experiences.
“The Army sent me to the DLI—Defense Language Institute. They wanted me to learn Kurdish and Dari. Sixty-three weeks for Kurdish, another forty-seven for Dari. It’s the most intensive language training in the world.”
Jason’s voice took on a reflective tone. “I thought I was supposed to learn to translate, you know? Tactical stuff. ‘Where are the weapons?’ ‘How many fighters?’ Basic interrogation vocabulary.”
“My Dari instructor was a guy named Dr. Hosseini. An Iranian exile, maybe in his sixties. One day, he writes a line on the board in Persian script. Beautiful script, calligraphy like art. He says, ‘Sgt. Stone, can you tell me what this says?’”
Jason turned back to the class. “I’m thinking it’s going to be military terminology, right? Maybe something about weapons or tactics. So, I sound it out phonetically, translating word by word. ‘The ... breeze ... at ... dawn ... has ... secrets ... to ... tell ... you.’”
“I sit back down, proud of myself. Dr. Hosseini, he just smiles and says, ‘That’s Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi. Thirteenth-century Sufi mystic. Now tell me what it means.’ And I’m looking at him like he’s crazy because I just told him what it says. But he shakes his head. ‘No, Mr. Stone. You told me what the words mean. What does the sentence mean?’”
The classroom was completely silent now.
“Took me three months to understand what he was getting at. See, I thought language was just ... translation. An English word equals a Dari word, right? But Dr. Hosseini kept giving us poetry, philosophy, these Persian texts that were eight hundred years old and still relevant. Slowly, I began to realize—when you truly learn a language, you can’t just learn words; you have to learn how an entire culture thinks.”
Jason’s voice grew quieter. “There’s this concept in Dari—’ta’arof.’ There’s no direct English translation. In the Islamic context it’s the process of finding a suitable marriage partner. In the Persian context it’s a sophisticated system of showing respect. For example, when someone offers you tea, you should to refuse twice before accepting. Not because you don’t want tea, but because accepting too quickly implies they’re obligated to serve you.”
He looked around the room. “Took me months to understand that. Once I did, I realized how many cultural landmines you could step on just by being direct. In American culture, we value straightforwardness. In Persian culture, that can be seen as insulting or aggressive.”
“It changed how I saw everything.” Jason’s voice was confessional now. “By my second year, I was dreaming in and thinking in Dari. The interesting thing is that when you think in another language, you think differently. The grammar is different, the metaphors are different, and the entire logical structure is different.”
“Dr. Hosseini used to say, ‘Americans think in straight lines. Persians think in spirals.’ And he was right. In Persian poetry, you approach truth indirectly, through layers of meaning. In Kurdish oral tradition, stories have multiple interpretations depending on your audience and your relationship to the speaker.”
He realized he was lecturing the class, blushed, and started to sit down.
“Not so Mr. Stone. This is fascinating, please go on.”
Jason nodded and turned to Emma Wilson, who happened to be sitting next to him.
“Okay. Hey, Emma, I apologize in advance for embarrassing you, but would you mind if I used you as an illustration? I promise to keep it academic.”
She looked surprised at being singled out. “I ... okay?”
“People in different cultures and speak different languages pay attention to different things and organize their thoughts differently. For example, if your language doesn’t have words for individual numbers, you can’t count the way we do. You might say ‘a small herd’ to describe the seven cows we see in the pasture.
“Here’s how the same observation—the same truth—gets expressed completely differently depending on cultural thinking patterns.” Jason stood up, moving to the front of the class. “American directness versus Persian poetic tradition.”
He cleared his throat. “So, the Western way first. Emma, I can see that you’re intelligent and highly articulate. You challenge ideas effectively. Physically, you have striking green eyes and dark hair; you dress professionally, you’re confident in discussions, and you’re not afraid to disagree with people.”
“That’s a direct observation, straightforward assessment.”
Emma’s cheeks reddened.
“Now, a Persian poet—someone thinking in that spiraling, metaphorical tradition of Dari—would describe you much differently.”
He paused, closed his eyes, and switched almost into a different rhythm of speech, more measured, more musical. His arms began to move slowly, dramatically.
“In this ancient garden of discourse, there blooms a flower whose petals unfold in shades of the forest at autumn. One whose voice carries the music of a mountain stream questioning the stones in its path. Her words are like arrows shot by a master archer—they find their mark not through anger, but through the precision that comes from understanding the weight of the bow and the necessity of the shot. When she speaks, it is as if the evening star has chosen to debate with the dawn, neither yielding, both essential for the completion of the sky.”
The classroom had gone utterly silent. Emma stared at him, her mouth open.
Jason began pacing slowly, his hands moving as if he were painting the words in the air.
“Behold one whose eyes are like twin emeralds that catch the first light of a summer dawn—not the sun-drenched green of new grass, but the deep green of forest pools where ancient wisdom sleeps. Her eyes are doorways through which the fresh soul of inquiry gazes out at the world, seeking always the question behind the question, the truth that hides beneath the surface of foolish answers.”