🔗 Share this article Within the Bombed-Out Debris of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Volume I Had Translated In the wreckage of a fallen apartment block, a solitary image remained with me: a tome I had converted from the English language to Persian, resting partially covered in dirt and ash. Its front was ripped and smudged, its pages curled and burned, but it was still legible. Still communicating. A Metropolis Under Bombardment Two days earlier, rockets began striking the city. There were no warnings, just sudden, powerful explosions. The web was entirely severed. I was in my apartment, translating a work about what it means to carry language across tongues, and the ethics and worries of occupying someone else's voice. As edifices fell, I sat revising a text that contended, in its understated way, for the persistence of purpose. Everything halted. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to go to print was stranded when the facility ceased operations. Bookstores closed one by one. One night, when the booms were too nearby, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the library in my apartment, holding lexicons, rare books I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night. Distance and Loss My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure towns – 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 factory was burning, dark smoke spiraling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to chase them. During those days, moods passed over the city like a front: swift dread, anxiety, righteous anger at the unfairness, then detachment. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate queries and references that translation demands. Outside, concussive forces blew windows from their sashes; at a relative's house, every pane was shattered, the belongings lay broken, objects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, painting at an stand, refusing to let quiet and dirt have the final say. Converting Pain A picture was shared on social media of a young poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her poem went spread rapidly next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an elderly woman dashing between passages, shouting a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some buried memory. She was searching for a child who would never come home. We were all translating, in our own way: transforming devastation into art, loss into lines, mourning into longing. The Craft as Defiance A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself translating a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet kept creating until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all desired – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth pursuing. During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond literary craft: it was an act of resistance, of remaining, of enduring. One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his confinement, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that translation become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, goal, practice, support, and symbol” all at once. A Marked Work And then came the photograph. I spotted it on a platform and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, marked but surviving, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, drained of life among the concrete and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but surviving. 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 fire, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, unyielding declination to disappear.
In the wreckage of a fallen apartment block, a solitary image remained with me: a tome I had converted from the English language to Persian, resting partially covered in dirt and ash. Its front was ripped and smudged, its pages curled and burned, but it was still legible. Still communicating. A Metropolis Under Bombardment Two days earlier, rockets began striking the city. There were no warnings, just sudden, powerful explosions. The web was entirely severed. I was in my apartment, translating a work about what it means to carry language across tongues, and the ethics and worries of occupying someone else's voice. As edifices fell, I sat revising a text that contended, in its understated way, for the persistence of purpose. Everything halted. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to go to print was stranded when the facility ceased operations. Bookstores closed one by one. One night, when the booms were too nearby, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the library in my apartment, holding lexicons, rare books I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night. Distance and Loss My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure towns – 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 factory was burning, dark smoke spiraling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to chase them. During those days, moods passed over the city like a front: swift dread, anxiety, righteous anger at the unfairness, then detachment. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate queries and references that translation demands. Outside, concussive forces blew windows from their sashes; at a relative's house, every pane was shattered, the belongings lay broken, objects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, painting at an stand, refusing to let quiet and dirt have the final say. Converting Pain A picture was shared on social media of a young poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her poem went spread rapidly next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an elderly woman dashing between passages, shouting a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some buried memory. She was searching for a child who would never come home. We were all translating, in our own way: transforming devastation into art, loss into lines, mourning into longing. The Craft as Defiance A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself translating a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet kept creating until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all desired – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth pursuing. During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond literary craft: it was an act of resistance, of remaining, of enduring. One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his confinement, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that translation become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, goal, practice, support, and symbol” all at once. A Marked Work And then came the photograph. I spotted it on a platform and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, marked but surviving, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, drained of life among the concrete and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but surviving. 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 fire, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, unyielding declination to disappear.