🔗 Share this article Among the Devastated Remains of an Apartment Block, I Found a Book I’d Translated In the debris of a collapsed building, a particular vision stayed with me: a tome I had rendered from the English language to Farsi, resting half-buried in dirt and soot. Its jacket was ripped and stained, its sheets curled and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still uttering words. An Urban Center Amid Attack Two days before, missiles started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, forceful explosions. The digital network was totally severed. I was in my residence, rendering a book about what it means to transport language across languages, and the principles and concerns of inhabiting another’s narrative. As buildings collapsed, I sat editing a text that argued, in its understated way, for the persistence of significance. Everything halted. A project my publisher had been about to send to press was stranded when the printing house closed. Bookstores locked their doors one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the library in my apartment, holding reference books, rare volumes I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night. Distance and Grief My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be safer towns – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the distance, a plant was on fire, dark smoke coiling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and danger seemed to follow them. During those days, emotions swept through the city like a storm: sudden terror, anxiety, indignation at the wrong, then detachment. Beyond the emotional toll, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate searches and materials that translation demands. Outside, blast waves blew windows from their casings; at a relative's house, every window was shattered, the furniture lay broken, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, creating at an easel, refusing to let stillness and debris have the ultimate victory. Transforming Pain A image circulated on social media of a 23-year-old poet who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her poem went spread rapidly alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an elderly woman dashing between passages, yelling a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some repressed remembrance. She was looking for a child who would never come home. We were all transforming, in our own way: changing devastation into image, demise into verse, mourning into search. Translation as Defiance A week after the attacks began, still amidst devastation, I found myself rendering a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet kept working until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all longed for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward. During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than a skill: it was an act of resistance, of remaining, of persisting. One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his confinement, asking for more resources, insisting that language study become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, goal, practice, foundation, and symbol” all at once. A Marked Work And then came the photograph. I saw it on a news site and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, marked but whole, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, devoid of life among the rubble and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but enduring. I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the full weight of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else disappears. It is a subtle, determined rejection to be silenced.
In the debris of a collapsed building, a particular vision stayed with me: a tome I had rendered from the English language to Farsi, resting half-buried in dirt and soot. Its jacket was ripped and stained, its sheets curled and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still uttering words. An Urban Center Amid Attack Two days before, missiles started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, forceful explosions. The digital network was totally severed. I was in my residence, rendering a book about what it means to transport language across languages, and the principles and concerns of inhabiting another’s narrative. As buildings collapsed, I sat editing a text that argued, in its understated way, for the persistence of significance. Everything halted. A project my publisher had been about to send to press was stranded when the printing house closed. Bookstores locked their doors one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the library in my apartment, holding reference books, rare volumes I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night. Distance and Grief My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be safer towns – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the distance, a plant was on fire, dark smoke coiling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and danger seemed to follow them. During those days, emotions swept through the city like a storm: sudden terror, anxiety, indignation at the wrong, then detachment. Beyond the emotional toll, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate searches and materials that translation demands. Outside, blast waves blew windows from their casings; at a relative's house, every window was shattered, the furniture lay broken, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, creating at an easel, refusing to let stillness and debris have the ultimate victory. Transforming Pain A image circulated on social media of a 23-year-old poet who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her poem went spread rapidly alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an elderly woman dashing between passages, yelling a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some repressed remembrance. She was looking for a child who would never come home. We were all transforming, in our own way: changing devastation into image, demise into verse, mourning into search. Translation as Defiance A week after the attacks began, still amidst devastation, I found myself rendering a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet kept working until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all longed for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward. During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than a skill: it was an act of resistance, of remaining, of persisting. One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his confinement, asking for more resources, insisting that language study become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, goal, practice, foundation, and symbol” all at once. A Marked Work And then came the photograph. I saw it on a news site and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, marked but whole, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, devoid of life among the rubble and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but enduring. I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the full weight of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else disappears. It is a subtle, determined rejection to be silenced.