🔗 Share this article Among those Ruined Debris of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Book I Had Translated In the rubble of a collapsed building, a single sight stayed with me: a volume I had rendered from the English language to Farsi, resting partly concealed in dust and ash. Its jacket was ripped and stained, its leaves curled and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating. A Metropolis During Assault Two days prior, rockets began striking the city. There were no sirens, just unexpected, violent detonations. The internet was entirely severed. I was in my residence, working on a work about what it means to transport language across languages, and the morals and concerns of taking on another’s narrative. As structures came down, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its subtle way, for the persistence of meaning. Everything stopped. A project my publisher had been about to publish was stuck when the facility shut down. Shops shut one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, holding lexicons, valuable volumes I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That library was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night. Distance and Grief My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous 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 photo: in the faraway, a plant was ablaze, thick smoke spiraling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to follow them. During those days, feelings passed over the city like a front: instant fear, unease, righteous anger at the wrong, then apathy. Beyond the personal impact, the attack eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and references that the work demands. Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their casings; at a family member's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the possessions lay ruined, household items scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an easel, refusing to let silence and dust have the last word. Transforming Sorrow A photograph spread online of a young writer who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her poem went viral with her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an elderly woman hurrying between alleys, yelling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some deep-seated recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home. We were all converting, in our own way: changing destruction into image, death into poetry, sorrow into longing. The Craft as Defiance A week after the attacks began, still amidst ruin, I found myself translating a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet persisted creating until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all longed for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth pursuing. During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond literary craft: it was an act of perseverance, of remaining, of enduring. One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his prison cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that language study become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, aspiration, rigor, anchor, and symbol” all at once. A Scarred Work And then came the photograph. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, damaged but surviving, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, stripped of life among the debris and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but enduring. I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, stubborn rejection to disappear.
In the rubble of a collapsed building, a single sight stayed with me: a volume I had rendered from the English language to Farsi, resting partly concealed in dust and ash. Its jacket was ripped and stained, its leaves curled and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating. A Metropolis During Assault Two days prior, rockets began striking the city. There were no sirens, just unexpected, violent detonations. The internet was entirely severed. I was in my residence, working on a work about what it means to transport language across languages, and the morals and concerns of taking on another’s narrative. As structures came down, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its subtle way, for the persistence of meaning. Everything stopped. A project my publisher had been about to publish was stuck when the facility shut down. Shops shut one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, holding lexicons, valuable volumes I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That library was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night. Distance and Grief My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous 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 photo: in the faraway, a plant was ablaze, thick smoke spiraling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to follow them. During those days, feelings passed over the city like a front: instant fear, unease, righteous anger at the wrong, then apathy. Beyond the personal impact, the attack eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and references that the work demands. Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their casings; at a family member's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the possessions lay ruined, household items scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an easel, refusing to let silence and dust have the last word. Transforming Sorrow A photograph spread online of a young writer who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her poem went viral with her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an elderly woman hurrying between alleys, yelling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some deep-seated recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home. We were all converting, in our own way: changing destruction into image, death into poetry, sorrow into longing. The Craft as Defiance A week after the attacks began, still amidst ruin, I found myself translating a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet persisted creating until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all longed for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth pursuing. During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond literary craft: it was an act of perseverance, of remaining, of enduring. One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his prison cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that language study become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, aspiration, rigor, anchor, and symbol” all at once. A Scarred Work And then came the photograph. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, damaged but surviving, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, stripped of life among the debris and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but enduring. I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, stubborn rejection to disappear.