🔗 Share this article Amid those Ruined Remains of an Residential Building, I Found a Volume I’d Rendered In the debris of a destroyed apartment block, a solitary image remained with me: a volume I had rendered from the English language to Persian, lying half-buried in dirt and ash. Its cover was shredded and stained, its sheets curled and scorched, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking. A Metropolis During Attack Two days before, rockets started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, forceful explosions. The internet was completely severed. I was in my flat, rendering a book about what it means to carry words across cultures, and the ethics and concerns of occupying a different narrative. As buildings collapsed, I sat editing a text that contended, in its subtle way, for the persistence of significance. Everything stopped. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to go to print was halted when the facility ceased operations. Shops locked their doors one by one. One night, when the explosions were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the library in my apartment, holding reference books, valuable editions I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night. Distance and Grief My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous towns – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a image: in the distance, a plant was burning, black smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to follow them. During those days, feelings swept through the city like a front: instant terror, apprehension, moral outrage at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick look-ups and references that the work demands. Outside, concussive forces blew windows from their sashes; at a family member's house, every pane was shattered, the furniture lay ruined, objects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an easel, choosing not to let quiet and dust have the ultimate victory. Transforming Pain A image circulated online of a young poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an elderly woman hurrying between alleyways, calling a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some repressed remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home. We were all translating, in our own way: transforming destruction into art, demise into lines, sorrow into quest. The Work as Resistance A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself rendering a children’s tale 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 lost his sight yet continued working until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all longed for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth reaching toward. During those nights, I understood translation as something more than literary craft: it was an act of defiance, of holding one's ground, of enduring. One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his cell, asking for more books, insisting that translation become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, aspiration, discipline, foundation, and metaphor” all at once. An Enduring Work And then came the image. I noticed it on a website and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, marked but surviving, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, stripped of life among the concrete and ruins. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but persisting. I gazed upon 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 attack, 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 crumbles. It is a persistent, unyielding rejection to vanish.
In the debris of a destroyed apartment block, a solitary image remained with me: a volume I had rendered from the English language to Persian, lying half-buried in dirt and ash. Its cover was shredded and stained, its sheets curled and scorched, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking. A Metropolis During Attack Two days before, rockets started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, forceful explosions. The internet was completely severed. I was in my flat, rendering a book about what it means to carry words across cultures, and the ethics and concerns of occupying a different narrative. As buildings collapsed, I sat editing a text that contended, in its subtle way, for the persistence of significance. Everything stopped. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to go to print was halted when the facility ceased operations. Shops locked their doors one by one. One night, when the explosions were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the library in my apartment, holding reference books, valuable editions I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night. Distance and Grief My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous towns – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a image: in the distance, a plant was burning, black smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to follow them. During those days, feelings swept through the city like a front: instant terror, apprehension, moral outrage at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick look-ups and references that the work demands. Outside, concussive forces blew windows from their sashes; at a family member's house, every pane was shattered, the furniture lay ruined, objects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an easel, choosing not to let quiet and dust have the ultimate victory. Transforming Pain A image circulated online of a young poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an elderly woman hurrying between alleyways, calling a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some repressed remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home. We were all translating, in our own way: transforming destruction into art, demise into lines, sorrow into quest. The Work as Resistance A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself rendering a children’s tale 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 lost his sight yet continued working until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all longed for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth reaching toward. During those nights, I understood translation as something more than literary craft: it was an act of defiance, of holding one's ground, of enduring. One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his cell, asking for more books, insisting that translation become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, aspiration, discipline, foundation, and metaphor” all at once. An Enduring Work And then came the image. I noticed it on a website and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, marked but surviving, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, stripped of life among the concrete and ruins. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but persisting. I gazed upon 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 attack, 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 crumbles. It is a persistent, unyielding rejection to vanish.