🔗 Share this article Amid the Devastated Debris of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Volume I Had Rendered Among the debris of a fallen building, a solitary vision stayed with me: a book I had converted from the English language to Persian, resting partly concealed in dirt and ash. Its cover was ripped and smudged, its pages curled and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating. A Metropolis Amid Bombardment Two days before, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, powerful blasts. The digital network was totally disconnected. I was in my flat, translating a text about what it means to transport words across languages, and the morals and anxieties of taking on a different voice. As buildings fell, I sat editing a text that contended, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of meaning. Everything ceased. A book my publishing house had been about to go to print was stranded when the printing house shut down. Bookstores locked their doors one by one. One night, when the booms were too close, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop worrying about the library in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, rare books I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night. Dispersal and Grief My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure areas – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a picture: in the faraway, a plant was burning, black smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly somewhere else, and danger seemed to follow them. During those days, moods moved through the city like a front: sudden terror, unease, righteous anger at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the emotional toll, the attack eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate queries and references that the work demands. Outside, shockwaves ripped windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the furniture lay damaged, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an stand, declining to let stillness and dust have the final say. Transforming Grief A picture circulated on social media of a young poet who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her verse went viral with her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an older woman running between alleys, yelling a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some deep-seated remembrance. She was looking for a child who would never come home. We were all transforming, in our own way: changing ruin into image, loss into poetry, mourning into search. The Craft as Resistance A week after the attacks began, still amidst ruin, I found myself translating a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet persisted working until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all yearned for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward. During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond literary craft: it was an act of perseverance, of staying put, of enduring. One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his confinement, asking for more books, insisting that translation become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, aspiration, discipline, foundation, and analogy” all at once. An Enduring Legacy And then came the photograph. I spotted it on a platform and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, damaged but surviving, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been devoid of color, drained of life among the rubble 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 stared at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a political act”, but I had never felt the full weight of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice had significance”. 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 persistent, stubborn declination to vanish.
Among the debris of a fallen building, a solitary vision stayed with me: a book I had converted from the English language to Persian, resting partly concealed in dirt and ash. Its cover was ripped and smudged, its pages curled and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating. A Metropolis Amid Bombardment Two days before, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, powerful blasts. The digital network was totally disconnected. I was in my flat, translating a text about what it means to transport words across languages, and the morals and anxieties of taking on a different voice. As buildings fell, I sat editing a text that contended, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of meaning. Everything ceased. A book my publishing house had been about to go to print was stranded when the printing house shut down. Bookstores locked their doors one by one. One night, when the booms were too close, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop worrying about the library in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, rare books I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night. Dispersal and Grief My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure areas – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a picture: in the faraway, a plant was burning, black smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly somewhere else, and danger seemed to follow them. During those days, moods moved through the city like a front: sudden terror, unease, righteous anger at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the emotional toll, the attack eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate queries and references that the work demands. Outside, shockwaves ripped windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the furniture lay damaged, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an stand, declining to let stillness and dust have the final say. Transforming Grief A picture circulated on social media of a young poet who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her verse went viral with her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an older woman running between alleys, yelling a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some deep-seated remembrance. She was looking for a child who would never come home. We were all transforming, in our own way: changing ruin into image, loss into poetry, mourning into search. The Craft as Resistance A week after the attacks began, still amidst ruin, I found myself translating a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet persisted working until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all yearned for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward. During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond literary craft: it was an act of perseverance, of staying put, of enduring. One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his confinement, asking for more books, insisting that translation become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, aspiration, discipline, foundation, and analogy” all at once. An Enduring Legacy And then came the photograph. I spotted it on a platform and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, damaged but surviving, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been devoid of color, drained of life among the rubble 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 stared at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a political act”, but I had never felt the full weight of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice had significance”. 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 persistent, stubborn declination to vanish.