🔗 Share this article Among the Bombed-Out Debris of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Book I Had Translated Among the rubble of a collapsed building, a particular image stayed with me: a tome I had translated from the English language to Persian, sitting half-buried in dirt and soot. Its cover was ripped and stained, its sheets bent and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating. A City Under Bombardment Two days before, missiles started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just sudden, forceful blasts. The internet was completely cut off. I was in my residence, working on a book about what it means to transport text across tongues, and the morals and worries of inhabiting someone else's perspective. As buildings fell, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of significance. Everything halted. A project my publisher had been about to send to press was stuck when the printer ceased operations. Bookstores shut one by one. One night, when the booms were too nearby, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the library in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, rare books I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That library was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night. Distance and Grief My partner 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 departing, she sent me a photo: in the distance, a plant was ablaze, thick smoke coiling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to follow them. During those days, feelings swept through the city like weather: instant terror, anxiety, moral outrage at the wrong, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the bombardment destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick searches and references that translation demands. Outside, concussive forces ripped windows from their casings; at a relative's house, every pane was broken, the belongings lay ruined, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, creating at an stand, declining to let silence and debris have the ultimate victory. Transforming Sorrow A image was shared digitally of a 23-year-old poet who was died when missiles struck a building. Her poem went spread rapidly next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an older woman running between passages, shouting a name. People 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 transforming, in our own way: transforming devastation into image, death into verse, sorrow into search. The Craft as Defiance A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself translating a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet kept creating until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all longed for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth pursuing. During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than a skill: it was an act of resistance, of staying put, of enduring. One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his prison cell, asking for more resources, insisting that translation become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, hope, practice, support, and analogy” all at once. A Marked Voice And then came the photograph. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, damaged but surviving, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, devoid of life among the rubble and ruins. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but surviving. I stared at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a act with consequences”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, stubborn refusal to vanish.
Among the rubble of a collapsed building, a particular image stayed with me: a tome I had translated from the English language to Persian, sitting half-buried in dirt and soot. Its cover was ripped and stained, its sheets bent and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating. A City Under Bombardment Two days before, missiles started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just sudden, forceful blasts. The internet was completely cut off. I was in my residence, working on a book about what it means to transport text across tongues, and the morals and worries of inhabiting someone else's perspective. As buildings fell, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of significance. Everything halted. A project my publisher had been about to send to press was stuck when the printer ceased operations. Bookstores shut one by one. One night, when the booms were too nearby, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the library in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, rare books I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That library was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night. Distance and Grief My partner 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 departing, she sent me a photo: in the distance, a plant was ablaze, thick smoke coiling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to follow them. During those days, feelings swept through the city like weather: instant terror, anxiety, moral outrage at the wrong, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the bombardment destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick searches and references that translation demands. Outside, concussive forces ripped windows from their casings; at a relative's house, every pane was broken, the belongings lay ruined, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, creating at an stand, declining to let silence and debris have the ultimate victory. Transforming Sorrow A image was shared digitally of a 23-year-old poet who was died when missiles struck a building. Her poem went spread rapidly next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an older woman running between passages, shouting a name. People 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 transforming, in our own way: transforming devastation into image, death into verse, sorrow into search. The Craft as Defiance A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself translating a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet kept creating until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all longed for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth pursuing. During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than a skill: it was an act of resistance, of staying put, of enduring. One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his prison cell, asking for more resources, insisting that translation become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, hope, practice, support, and analogy” all at once. A Marked Voice And then came the photograph. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, damaged but surviving, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, devoid of life among the rubble and ruins. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but surviving. I stared at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a act with consequences”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, stubborn refusal to vanish.