🔗 Share this article Amid the Bombed-Out Debris of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Book I’d Rendered In the wreckage of a destroyed building, a particular vision stayed with me: a volume I had translated from English to Persian, lying partly concealed in dirt and ash. Its cover was torn and dirtied, its leaves bent and scorched, but it was still legible. Still communicating. A City Under Attack Two days earlier, missiles started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, violent blasts. The web was entirely disconnected. I was in my flat, translating a book about what it means to carry words across tongues, and the ethics and anxieties of taking on a different narrative. As buildings collapsed, I sat revising a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the endurance of meaning. Everything stopped. A project my publishing house had been about to send to press was stuck when the printing house shut down. Shops 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 worrying about the bookshelves in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, rare volumes I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night. Separation and Devastation My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure locations – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a image: in the distance, a factory was burning, dark smoke curling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and danger seemed to pursue them. During those days, emotions swept through the city like a front: instant terror, anxiety, moral outrage at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and references that the work demands. Outside, blast waves ripped windows from their casings; at a relative's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the possessions lay ruined, objects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an stand, refusing to let silence and dirt have the final say. Translating Grief A picture was shared online of a young poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman dashing between passages, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some buried memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home. We were all converting, in our own way: turning destruction into picture, death into verse, grief into quest. The Work as Resistance A week after the attacks began, still amidst devastation, I found myself working on a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will recover 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 persisted creating until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all yearned for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth striving for. During those nights, I understood translation as something more than a skill: it was an act of resistance, of holding one's ground, of enduring. One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his confinement, asking for more resources, insisting that linguistic work become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, aspiration, rigor, anchor, and metaphor” all at once. A Marked Work And then came the photograph. I saw it on a platform 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 color, but it might as well have been black and white, stripped of life among the concrete and wreckage. 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 act with consequences”, but I had never felt the full weight of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, stubborn declination to disappear.
In the wreckage of a destroyed building, a particular vision stayed with me: a volume I had translated from English to Persian, lying partly concealed in dirt and ash. Its cover was torn and dirtied, its leaves bent and scorched, but it was still legible. Still communicating. A City Under Attack Two days earlier, missiles started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, violent blasts. The web was entirely disconnected. I was in my flat, translating a book about what it means to carry words across tongues, and the ethics and anxieties of taking on a different narrative. As buildings collapsed, I sat revising a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the endurance of meaning. Everything stopped. A project my publishing house had been about to send to press was stuck when the printing house shut down. Shops 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 worrying about the bookshelves in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, rare volumes I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night. Separation and Devastation My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure locations – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a image: in the distance, a factory was burning, dark smoke curling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and danger seemed to pursue them. During those days, emotions swept through the city like a front: instant terror, anxiety, moral outrage at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and references that the work demands. Outside, blast waves ripped windows from their casings; at a relative's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the possessions lay ruined, objects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an stand, refusing to let silence and dirt have the final say. Translating Grief A picture was shared online of a young poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman dashing between passages, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some buried memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home. We were all converting, in our own way: turning destruction into picture, death into verse, grief into quest. The Work as Resistance A week after the attacks began, still amidst devastation, I found myself working on a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will recover 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 persisted creating until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all yearned for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth striving for. During those nights, I understood translation as something more than a skill: it was an act of resistance, of holding one's ground, of enduring. One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his confinement, asking for more resources, insisting that linguistic work become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, aspiration, rigor, anchor, and metaphor” all at once. A Marked Work And then came the photograph. I saw it on a platform 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 color, but it might as well have been black and white, stripped of life among the concrete and wreckage. 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 act with consequences”, but I had never felt the full weight of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, stubborn declination to disappear.