🔗 Share this article Amid the Devastated Debris of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Volume I’d Translated In the wreckage of a fallen structure, a solitary image lingered with me: a book I had converted from English to Persian, resting half-buried in dirt and ash. Its jacket was torn and dirtied, its leaves bent and burned, but it was still readable. Still speaking. A Metropolis Amid Attack Two days earlier, missiles commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, powerful detonations. The web was completely disconnected. I was in my apartment, translating a work about what it means to carry text across cultures, and the principles and anxieties of occupying someone else's perspective. As buildings came down, I sat polishing a text that contended, in its subtle way, for the endurance of purpose. Everything stopped. A project my publishing house had been about to publish was stranded when the printing house ceased operations. Bookstores shut one by one. One night, when the booms were too nearby, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, holding dictionaries, rare volumes I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night. Separation and Loss My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure areas – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a picture: in the distance, a industrial site was burning, dark smoke coiling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to chase them. During those days, emotions moved through the city like a storm: sudden dread, apprehension, righteous anger at the unfairness, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate searches and sources that the work demands. Outside, blast waves tore windows from their frames; at a relative's house, every window was shattered, the belongings lay ruined, objects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an easel, choosing not to let quiet and dirt have the last word. Transforming Sorrow A picture was shared digitally of a 23-year-old poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an older woman hurrying between alleys, yelling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some buried remembrance. She was seeking a child who would never come home. We were all converting, in our own way: transforming ruin into art, demise into poetry, mourning into search. The Work as Persistence A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself rendering a fable about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet continued producing until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all desired – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth pursuing. During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than literary craft: it was an act of resistance, of holding one's ground, of persisting. One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his prison cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that language study become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, goal, discipline, foundation, and symbol” all at once. A Marked Voice And then came the photograph. I saw it on a website and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, scarred but surviving, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, stripped of life among the concrete and debris. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but enduring. I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a act with consequences”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, stubborn refusal to vanish.
In the wreckage of a fallen structure, a solitary image lingered with me: a book I had converted from English to Persian, resting half-buried in dirt and ash. Its jacket was torn and dirtied, its leaves bent and burned, but it was still readable. Still speaking. A Metropolis Amid Attack Two days earlier, missiles commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, powerful detonations. The web was completely disconnected. I was in my apartment, translating a work about what it means to carry text across cultures, and the principles and anxieties of occupying someone else's perspective. As buildings came down, I sat polishing a text that contended, in its subtle way, for the endurance of purpose. Everything stopped. A project my publishing house had been about to publish was stranded when the printing house ceased operations. Bookstores shut one by one. One night, when the booms were too nearby, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, holding dictionaries, rare volumes I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night. Separation and Loss My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure areas – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a picture: in the distance, a industrial site was burning, dark smoke coiling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to chase them. During those days, emotions moved through the city like a storm: sudden dread, apprehension, righteous anger at the unfairness, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate searches and sources that the work demands. Outside, blast waves tore windows from their frames; at a relative's house, every window was shattered, the belongings lay ruined, objects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an easel, choosing not to let quiet and dirt have the last word. Transforming Sorrow A picture was shared digitally of a 23-year-old poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an older woman hurrying between alleys, yelling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some buried remembrance. She was seeking a child who would never come home. We were all converting, in our own way: transforming ruin into art, demise into poetry, mourning into search. The Work as Persistence A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself rendering a fable about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet continued producing until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all desired – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth pursuing. During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than literary craft: it was an act of resistance, of holding one's ground, of persisting. One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his prison cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that language study become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, goal, discipline, foundation, and symbol” all at once. A Marked Voice And then came the photograph. I saw it on a website and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, scarred but surviving, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, stripped of life among the concrete and debris. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but enduring. I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a act with consequences”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, stubborn refusal to vanish.