In the wreckage of a collapsed building, a single vision remained with me: a tome I had rendered from English to Persian, lying partly concealed in dust and soot. Its jacket was ripped and smudged, its sheets curled and burned, but it was still legible. Still uttering words.
An Urban Center During Attack
Two days before, missiles commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, powerful blasts. The digital network was totally cut off. I was in my apartment, translating a work about what it means to carry text across cultures, and the principles and anxieties of occupying someone else's perspective. As edifices collapsed, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the persistence of significance.
Everything ceased. A project my publisher had been about to go to print was halted when the facility shut down. Shops locked their doors one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the library in my apartment, holding lexicons, valuable volumes I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my career's work, 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 safer areas – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a plant was on fire, thick smoke spiraling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and threat seemed to pursue them.
During those days, feelings moved through the city like a front: sudden fear, apprehension, righteous anger at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the personal impact, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and materials that the work demands.
Outside, concussive forces ripped windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every window was broken, the possessions lay broken, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, painting at an stand, declining to let stillness and dust have the last word.
Converting Sorrow
A photograph circulated online of a 23-year-old artist who was died when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral alongside her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an elderly woman running between passages, yelling a name. Neighbours said she had mourned 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 translating, in our own way: changing destruction into picture, demise into verse, grief into longing.
The Craft as Resistance
A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of ruin, I found myself rendering a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep 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 impossible. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all yearned for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth striving for.
During those nights, I understood translation as something more than literary craft: it was an act of perseverance, of holding one's ground, of holding on.
One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his confinement, asking for more books, insisting that language study become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, hope, rigor, support, and analogy” all at once.
An Enduring Legacy
And then came the picture. I saw it on a website and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, damaged but surviving, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, stripped of life among the debris and debris. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but enduring.
I stared at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a political act”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under fire, 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 quiet, stubborn declination to vanish.
