🔗 Share this article Within the Ruined Remains of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Volume I Had Translated Within the wreckage of a collapsed structure, a solitary sight remained with me: a tome I had rendered from the English language to Persian, resting partly concealed in dust and ash. Its jacket was shredded and dirtied, its pages bent and scorched, but it was still readable. Still communicating. An Urban Center Under Assault Two days prior, missiles commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, forceful detonations. The internet was totally cut off. I was in my apartment, working on a book about what it means to carry text across tongues, and the principles and worries of inhabiting someone else's voice. As structures fell, I sat revising a text that argued, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of purpose. Everything halted. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to go to print was halted when the printing house 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 thinking about the shelves in my apartment, holding reference books, rare volumes I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That library was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night. Dispersal and Loss My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be safer locations – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a picture: in the faraway, a plant was ablaze, black smoke curling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and threat seemed to pursue them. During those days, emotions passed over the city like a storm: sudden terror, apprehension, moral outrage at the injustice, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant look-ups and materials that the work demands. Outside, concussive forces ripped windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every window was shattered, the belongings lay ruined, objects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, creating at an stand, refusing to let quiet and dirt have the final say. Transforming Pain A image was shared digitally of a young artist who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly next to her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an older woman running between alleys, yelling a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a conflict 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 translating, in our own way: turning ruin into picture, loss into verse, grief into longing. Translation as Defiance A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by ruin, I found myself rendering a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep 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 desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward. During those nights, I understood translation as something more than literary craft: it was an act of defiance, of staying put, of persisting. One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his prison cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that translation become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, hope, discipline, foundation, and symbol” all at once. A Marked Work And then came the image. I noticed it on a website and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, damaged but whole, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, devoid of life among the debris and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but persisting. I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a political act”, but I had never felt the full weight of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, determined declination to disappear.
Within the wreckage of a collapsed structure, a solitary sight remained with me: a tome I had rendered from the English language to Persian, resting partly concealed in dust and ash. Its jacket was shredded and dirtied, its pages bent and scorched, but it was still readable. Still communicating. An Urban Center Under Assault Two days prior, missiles commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, forceful detonations. The internet was totally cut off. I was in my apartment, working on a book about what it means to carry text across tongues, and the principles and worries of inhabiting someone else's voice. As structures fell, I sat revising a text that argued, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of purpose. Everything halted. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to go to print was halted when the printing house 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 thinking about the shelves in my apartment, holding reference books, rare volumes I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That library was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night. Dispersal and Loss My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be safer locations – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a picture: in the faraway, a plant was ablaze, black smoke curling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and threat seemed to pursue them. During those days, emotions passed over the city like a storm: sudden terror, apprehension, moral outrage at the injustice, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant look-ups and materials that the work demands. Outside, concussive forces ripped windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every window was shattered, the belongings lay ruined, objects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, creating at an stand, refusing to let quiet and dirt have the final say. Transforming Pain A image was shared digitally of a young artist who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly next to her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an older woman running between alleys, yelling a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a conflict 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 translating, in our own way: turning ruin into picture, loss into verse, grief into longing. Translation as Defiance A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by ruin, I found myself rendering a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep 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 desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward. During those nights, I understood translation as something more than literary craft: it was an act of defiance, of staying put, of persisting. One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his prison cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that translation become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, hope, discipline, foundation, and symbol” all at once. A Marked Work And then came the image. I noticed it on a website and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, damaged but whole, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, devoid of life among the debris and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but persisting. I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a political act”, but I had never felt the full weight of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, determined declination to disappear.