🔗 Share this article Amid the Ruined Debris of an Residential Building, I Found a Volume I’d Translated In the rubble of a fallen building, a single image lingered with me: a book I had rendered from the English language to Persian, sitting partially covered in dirt and ash. Its jacket was shredded and stained, its pages curled and singed, but it was still readable. Still speaking. An Urban Center Amid Assault Two days earlier, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no sirens, just sudden, violent detonations. The digital network was totally severed. I was in my residence, rendering a work about what it means to transport text across languages, and the morals and anxieties of taking on someone else's narrative. As edifices came down, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of significance. Everything ceased. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to send to press was halted when the printing house closed. Shops shut one by one. One night, when the explosions were too close, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the shelves in my apartment, holding dictionaries, rare editions I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night. Distance 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 went to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a plant was ablaze, black smoke curling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to pursue them. During those days, emotions moved through the city like weather: instant terror, anxiety, indignation at the injustice, then detachment. Beyond the personal impact, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate searches and materials that the work demands. Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their sashes; at a relative's house, every window was broken, the belongings lay ruined, personal effects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an easel, refusing to let stillness and debris have the last word. Translating Sorrow A image was shared online of a 23-year-old poet who was died when missiles struck a building. Her poem went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman running between passages, calling a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some deep-seated memory. She was seeking a child who would never come home. We were all transforming, in our own way: turning devastation into art, loss into lines, mourning into quest. Translation as Resistance A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself translating a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet kept 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 impossible, yet still worth reaching toward. During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than a skill: it was an act of defiance, of staying put, of holding on. One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his confinement, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that linguistic work become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, hope, rigor, anchor, and analogy” all at once. A Marked Legacy And then came the picture. I spotted it on a website and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, scarred but intact, my name printed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been black and white, devoid of life among the rubble and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but surviving. I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else falls away. It is a quiet, unyielding rejection to disappear.
In the rubble of a fallen building, a single image lingered with me: a book I had rendered from the English language to Persian, sitting partially covered in dirt and ash. Its jacket was shredded and stained, its pages curled and singed, but it was still readable. Still speaking. An Urban Center Amid Assault Two days earlier, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no sirens, just sudden, violent detonations. The digital network was totally severed. I was in my residence, rendering a work about what it means to transport text across languages, and the morals and anxieties of taking on someone else's narrative. As edifices came down, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of significance. Everything ceased. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to send to press was halted when the printing house closed. Shops shut one by one. One night, when the explosions were too close, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the shelves in my apartment, holding dictionaries, rare editions I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night. Distance 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 went to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a plant was ablaze, black smoke curling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to pursue them. During those days, emotions moved through the city like weather: instant terror, anxiety, indignation at the injustice, then detachment. Beyond the personal impact, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate searches and materials that the work demands. Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their sashes; at a relative's house, every window was broken, the belongings lay ruined, personal effects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an easel, refusing to let stillness and debris have the last word. Translating Sorrow A image was shared online of a 23-year-old poet who was died when missiles struck a building. Her poem went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman running between passages, calling a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some deep-seated memory. She was seeking a child who would never come home. We were all transforming, in our own way: turning devastation into art, loss into lines, mourning into quest. Translation as Resistance A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself translating a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet kept 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 impossible, yet still worth reaching toward. During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than a skill: it was an act of defiance, of staying put, of holding on. One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his confinement, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that linguistic work become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, hope, rigor, anchor, and analogy” all at once. A Marked Legacy And then came the picture. I spotted it on a website and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, scarred but intact, my name printed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been black and white, devoid of life among the rubble and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but surviving. I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else falls away. It is a quiet, unyielding rejection to disappear.