🔗 Share this article Amid the Ruined Debris of an Residential Building, I Saw a Book I Had Translated Within the rubble of a collapsed building, a particular sight remained with me: a volume I had translated from the English language to Persian, sitting partially covered in dust and soot. Its jacket was shredded and dirtied, its sheets curled and scorched, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking. A City Amid Attack Two days before, projectiles began striking the city. There were no warnings, just sudden, forceful explosions. The web was entirely severed. I was in my flat, translating a work about what it means to move text across languages, and the ethics and anxieties of occupying a different perspective. As structures collapsed, I sat revising a text that argued, in its quiet way, for the persistence of purpose. Everything stopped. A book my publishing house had been about to publish was stranded when the printing house closed. Shops closed one by one. One night, when the explosions were too imminent, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the library in my apartment, holding lexicons, valuable 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 make it through the night. Distance and Devastation My partner 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 pulling out, she sent me a photo: in the distance, a industrial site was burning, dark smoke coiling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to pursue them. During those days, feelings swept through the city like weather: sudden terror, anxiety, indignation at the wrong, then numbness. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate queries and references that the craft demands. Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their sashes; at a family member's house, every pane was broken, the belongings lay damaged, objects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an easel, choosing not to let stillness and dust have the last word. Transforming Grief A photograph circulated digitally of a young artist who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her poem went spread rapidly alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an older woman hurrying between alleys, 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 converting, in our own way: turning destruction into image, demise into lines, sorrow into longing. The Craft as Resistance A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself working on a fable 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 kept 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 pursuing. During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than literary craft: it was an act of defiance, of remaining, of holding on. One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his prison cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that translation become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, hope, rigor, foundation, and analogy” all at once. A Scarred Legacy And then came the picture. I saw it on a platform and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, damaged but intact, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, stripped of life among the rubble and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but enduring. 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 fire, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else falls away. It is a subtle, determined refusal to disappear.
Within the rubble of a collapsed building, a particular sight remained with me: a volume I had translated from the English language to Persian, sitting partially covered in dust and soot. Its jacket was shredded and dirtied, its sheets curled and scorched, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking. A City Amid Attack Two days before, projectiles began striking the city. There were no warnings, just sudden, forceful explosions. The web was entirely severed. I was in my flat, translating a work about what it means to move text across languages, and the ethics and anxieties of occupying a different perspective. As structures collapsed, I sat revising a text that argued, in its quiet way, for the persistence of purpose. Everything stopped. A book my publishing house had been about to publish was stranded when the printing house closed. Shops closed one by one. One night, when the explosions were too imminent, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the library in my apartment, holding lexicons, valuable 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 make it through the night. Distance and Devastation My partner 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 pulling out, she sent me a photo: in the distance, a industrial site was burning, dark smoke coiling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to pursue them. During those days, feelings swept through the city like weather: sudden terror, anxiety, indignation at the wrong, then numbness. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate queries and references that the craft demands. Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their sashes; at a family member's house, every pane was broken, the belongings lay damaged, objects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an easel, choosing not to let stillness and dust have the last word. Transforming Grief A photograph circulated digitally of a young artist who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her poem went spread rapidly alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an older woman hurrying between alleys, 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 converting, in our own way: turning destruction into image, demise into lines, sorrow into longing. The Craft as Resistance A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself working on a fable 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 kept 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 pursuing. During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than literary craft: it was an act of defiance, of remaining, of holding on. One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his prison cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that translation become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, hope, rigor, foundation, and analogy” all at once. A Scarred Legacy And then came the picture. I saw it on a platform and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, damaged but intact, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, stripped of life among the rubble and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but enduring. 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 fire, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else falls away. It is a subtle, determined refusal to disappear.