🔗 Share this article Among the Bombed-Out Remains of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Book I’d Translated Within the rubble of a collapsed building, a single sight lingered with me: a book I had rendered from English to Persian, resting half-buried in dust and ash. Its jacket was shredded and stained, its sheets bent and singed, but it was still legible. Still communicating. A Metropolis During Bombardment Two days earlier, missiles began striking the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, violent explosions. The internet was completely severed. I was in my residence, translating a book about what it means to move text across languages, and the principles and worries of occupying another’s voice. As structures fell, I sat editing a text that suggested, in its quiet way, for the endurance of significance. Everything stopped. A book my publisher had been about to go to print was halted when the printer closed. Shops shut one by one. One night, when the explosions were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop worrying about the library in my apartment, holding reference books, rare books I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night. Separation and Loss My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be safer towns – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a photo: in the faraway, a factory was on fire, black smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and threat seemed to pursue them. During those days, feelings passed over the city like weather: swift terror, anxiety, indignation at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick searches and sources that the work demands. Outside, blast waves ripped windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the belongings lay ruined, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an stand, refusing to let silence and dirt have the ultimate victory. Transforming Grief A picture was shared online of a young poet who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman running between passages, yelling a name. People said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some buried memory. She was seeking a child who would never come home. We were all transforming, in our own way: turning ruin into art, death into verse, mourning into longing. The Work as Resistance A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of ruin, I found myself rendering a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted producing until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all yearned for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth striving for. During those nights, I understood translation as something more than an art form: it was an act of defiance, of remaining, of holding on. One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker 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, rigor, foundation, and metaphor” all at once. An Enduring Work 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 works, damaged but surviving, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, drained of life among the concrete and ruins. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but persisting. I looked at 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 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 endure when everything else falls away. It is a persistent, determined rejection to vanish.
Within the rubble of a collapsed building, a single sight lingered with me: a book I had rendered from English to Persian, resting half-buried in dust and ash. Its jacket was shredded and stained, its sheets bent and singed, but it was still legible. Still communicating. A Metropolis During Bombardment Two days earlier, missiles began striking the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, violent explosions. The internet was completely severed. I was in my residence, translating a book about what it means to move text across languages, and the principles and worries of occupying another’s voice. As structures fell, I sat editing a text that suggested, in its quiet way, for the endurance of significance. Everything stopped. A book my publisher had been about to go to print was halted when the printer closed. Shops shut one by one. One night, when the explosions were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop worrying about the library in my apartment, holding reference books, rare books I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night. Separation and Loss My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be safer towns – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a photo: in the faraway, a factory was on fire, black smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and threat seemed to pursue them. During those days, feelings passed over the city like weather: swift terror, anxiety, indignation at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick searches and sources that the work demands. Outside, blast waves ripped windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the belongings lay ruined, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an stand, refusing to let silence and dirt have the ultimate victory. Transforming Grief A picture was shared online of a young poet who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman running between passages, yelling a name. People said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some buried memory. She was seeking a child who would never come home. We were all transforming, in our own way: turning ruin into art, death into verse, mourning into longing. The Work as Resistance A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of ruin, I found myself rendering a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted producing until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all yearned for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth striving for. During those nights, I understood translation as something more than an art form: it was an act of defiance, of remaining, of holding on. One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker 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, rigor, foundation, and metaphor” all at once. An Enduring Work 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 works, damaged but surviving, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, drained of life among the concrete and ruins. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but persisting. I looked at 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 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 endure when everything else falls away. It is a persistent, determined rejection to vanish.