🔗 Share this article Amid those Devastated Remains of an Residential Building, I Saw a Volume I’d Translated In the rubble of a fallen apartment block, a solitary image lingered with me: a volume I had rendered from the English language to Farsi, resting partly concealed in dirt and ash. Its cover was shredded and stained, its pages bent and scorched, but it was still readable. Still speaking. An Urban Center During Assault Two days earlier, rockets commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, powerful detonations. The web was entirely severed. I was in my residence, translating a book about what it means to move text across cultures, and the ethics and anxieties of taking on someone else's narrative. As edifices collapsed, I sat polishing a text that contended, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of purpose. Everything ceased. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to publish was stuck when the printing house closed. Retailers shut one by one. One night, when the booms were too close, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the bookshelves in my apartment, holding reference books, valuable volumes I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night. Distance and Loss My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure areas – 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 picture: in the background, a industrial site was on fire, black smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and danger seemed to chase them. During those days, feelings moved through the city like weather: instant dread, apprehension, moral outrage at the wrong, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick searches and materials that the work demands. Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their frames; at a relative's house, every pane was destroyed, the furniture lay damaged, household items scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an easel, choosing not to let silence and debris have the last word. Transforming Sorrow A picture circulated online of a young poet who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an aged woman dashing between alleyways, shouting a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some deep-seated remembrance. She was looking for a child who would never come home. We were all transforming, in our own way: transforming destruction into art, death into verse, grief into search. Translation as Persistence A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of destruction, I found myself working on a fable about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted working until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all desired – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth striving for. During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond a skill: it was an act of perseverance, 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 prison cell, asking for more books, insisting that translation become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, hope, discipline, foundation, and analogy” all at once. A Marked Legacy And then came the image. I noticed it on a platform and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, marked but surviving, 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 debris. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but enduring. 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 complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else disappears. It is a persistent, determined refusal to be silenced.
In the rubble of a fallen apartment block, a solitary image lingered with me: a volume I had rendered from the English language to Farsi, resting partly concealed in dirt and ash. Its cover was shredded and stained, its pages bent and scorched, but it was still readable. Still speaking. An Urban Center During Assault Two days earlier, rockets commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, powerful detonations. The web was entirely severed. I was in my residence, translating a book about what it means to move text across cultures, and the ethics and anxieties of taking on someone else's narrative. As edifices collapsed, I sat polishing a text that contended, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of purpose. Everything ceased. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to publish was stuck when the printing house closed. Retailers shut one by one. One night, when the booms were too close, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the bookshelves in my apartment, holding reference books, valuable volumes I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night. Distance and Loss My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure areas – 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 picture: in the background, a industrial site was on fire, black smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and danger seemed to chase them. During those days, feelings moved through the city like weather: instant dread, apprehension, moral outrage at the wrong, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick searches and materials that the work demands. Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their frames; at a relative's house, every pane was destroyed, the furniture lay damaged, household items scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an easel, choosing not to let silence and debris have the last word. Transforming Sorrow A picture circulated online of a young poet who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an aged woman dashing between alleyways, shouting a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some deep-seated remembrance. She was looking for a child who would never come home. We were all transforming, in our own way: transforming destruction into art, death into verse, grief into search. Translation as Persistence A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of destruction, I found myself working on a fable about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted working until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all desired – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth striving for. During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond a skill: it was an act of perseverance, 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 prison cell, asking for more books, insisting that translation become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, hope, discipline, foundation, and analogy” all at once. A Marked Legacy And then came the image. I noticed it on a platform and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, marked but surviving, 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 debris. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but enduring. 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 complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else disappears. It is a persistent, determined refusal to be silenced.