In the rubble of a destroyed structure, a single sight remained with me: a tome I had converted from the English language to Persian, lying partially covered in dirt and soot. Its cover was shredded and stained, its sheets curled and burned, but it was still readable. Still communicating.
A Metropolis Amid Bombardment
Two days earlier, rockets began striking the city. There were no sirens, just abrupt, violent explosions. The web was entirely cut off. I was in my flat, rendering a book about what it means to move words across languages, and the ethics and anxieties of inhabiting another’s perspective. As buildings collapsed, I sat revising a text that contended, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of significance.
Everything halted. A book my publishing house had been about to send to press was stuck when the printing house closed. Bookstores shut 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 dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, holding lexicons, valuable editions I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.
Separation 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 pulling out, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a factory was on fire, black smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and peril seemed to follow them.
During those days, moods moved through the city like a front: instant fear, apprehension, moral outrage at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the emotional toll, the attack eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate searches and references that the work demands.
Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their frames; at a relative's house, every sheet of glass was destroyed, the possessions lay damaged, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an easel, declining to let silence and debris have the final say.
Converting Grief
A image was shared digitally of a 23-year-old writer who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an aged woman dashing between passages, yelling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some repressed remembrance. She was looking for a child who would never come home.
We were all transforming, in our own way: turning ruin into picture, demise into verse, mourning into longing.
Translation as Defiance
A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of devastation, I found myself working on a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can possess 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 striving for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all longed for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth reaching toward.
During those nights, I understood translation as something more than literary craft: it was an act of defiance, of holding one's ground, of persisting.
One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his confinement, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that linguistic work become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, goal, practice, anchor, and analogy” all at once.
An Enduring Voice
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 renditions, scarred but intact, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, 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 enduring.
I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, unyielding rejection to vanish.
