Within the debris of a collapsed building, a single vision remained with me: a volume I had rendered from the English language to Persian, resting partially covered in dirt and ash. Its jacket was ripped and smudged, its sheets curled and scorched, but it was still readable. Still uttering words.
A Metropolis During Assault
Two days prior, projectiles started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, violent detonations. The web was completely severed. I was in my apartment, rendering a work about what it means to transport words across languages, and the morals and anxieties of occupying someone else's perspective. As buildings fell, I sat revising a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of purpose.
Everything stopped. A book my publisher had been about to publish was halted when the printing house shut down. Shops locked their doors one by one. One night, when the explosions were too nearby, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the library in my apartment, holding reference books, valuable books I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That library 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 less dangerous towns – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a photo: in the distance, a plant was ablaze, thick smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and peril seemed to follow them.
During those days, feelings swept through the city like a front: swift terror, apprehension, indignation at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the psychological cost, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant look-ups and references that the work demands.
Outside, blast waves tore windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every window was broken, the possessions lay broken, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, painting at an stand, declining to let stillness and dirt have the ultimate victory.
Converting Sorrow
A image circulated online of a young writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an elderly woman hurrying between passages, yelling a name. People said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some repressed memory. She was seeking a child who would never come home.
We were all transforming, in our own way: transforming destruction into image, loss into poetry, grief into search.
Translation as Resistance
A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of destruction, I found myself working on a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet continued producing until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all longed for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth pursuing.
During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than literary craft: it was an act of resistance, 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 leader in his cell, asking for more books, insisting that translation become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, aspiration, discipline, anchor, and analogy” all at once.
An Enduring Work
And then came the photograph. I spotted it on a platform and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, damaged but whole, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, stripped of life among the debris and ruins. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but surviving.
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 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 remain when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, determined refusal to disappear.
