🔗 Share this article Within the Ruined Debris of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Volume I’d Translated Within the wreckage of a fallen apartment block, a particular image remained with me: a volume I had rendered from the English language to Persian, sitting partly concealed in dust and ash. Its cover was shredded and smudged, its sheets bent and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking. An Urban Center Amid Attack Two days before, missiles commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, powerful detonations. The internet was entirely cut off. I was in my flat, working on a book about what it means to transport text across tongues, and the ethics and worries of inhabiting someone else's voice. As structures fell, I sat revising a text that argued, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of significance. Everything stopped. A book my publishing house had been about to publish was stuck when the printing house closed. Shops locked their doors one by one. One night, when the booms were too imminent, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, filled with reference books, rare volumes I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night. Dispersal and Devastation My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous towns – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a factory was on fire, dark smoke coiling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly far away, and threat seemed to follow them. During those days, feelings swept through the city like a front: swift fear, apprehension, righteous anger at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant look-ups and materials that translation demands. Outside, blast waves blew windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every pane was destroyed, the furniture lay damaged, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, working at an easel, choosing not to let silence and dust have the last word. Translating Pain A photograph was shared on social media of a 23-year-old poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an elderly woman running between alleys, shouting a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some repressed remembrance. She was seeking a child who would never come home. We were all translating, in our own way: turning devastation into art, demise into verse, grief into quest. The Craft as Resistance A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself rendering a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep 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 impossible. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all yearned for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth pursuing. During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than a skill: it was an act of resistance, of remaining, 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 confinement, asking for more books, insisting that translation become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, goal, rigor, support, and analogy” all at once. A Marked Work 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 renditions, marked but whole, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, drained 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 seen – scarred, but enduring. I stared at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a political act”, but I had never felt the complete significance 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 carry stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else falls away. It is a persistent, determined declination to disappear.
Within the wreckage of a fallen apartment block, a particular image remained with me: a volume I had rendered from the English language to Persian, sitting partly concealed in dust and ash. Its cover was shredded and smudged, its sheets bent and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking. An Urban Center Amid Attack Two days before, missiles commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, powerful detonations. The internet was entirely cut off. I was in my flat, working on a book about what it means to transport text across tongues, and the ethics and worries of inhabiting someone else's voice. As structures fell, I sat revising a text that argued, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of significance. Everything stopped. A book my publishing house had been about to publish was stuck when the printing house closed. Shops locked their doors one by one. One night, when the booms were too imminent, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, filled with reference books, rare volumes I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night. Dispersal and Devastation My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous towns – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a factory was on fire, dark smoke coiling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly far away, and threat seemed to follow them. During those days, feelings swept through the city like a front: swift fear, apprehension, righteous anger at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant look-ups and materials that translation demands. Outside, blast waves blew windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every pane was destroyed, the furniture lay damaged, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, working at an easel, choosing not to let silence and dust have the last word. Translating Pain A photograph was shared on social media of a 23-year-old poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an elderly woman running between alleys, shouting a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some repressed remembrance. She was seeking a child who would never come home. We were all translating, in our own way: turning devastation into art, demise into verse, grief into quest. The Craft as Resistance A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself rendering a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep 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 impossible. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all yearned for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth pursuing. During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than a skill: it was an act of resistance, of remaining, 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 confinement, asking for more books, insisting that translation become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, goal, rigor, support, and analogy” all at once. A Marked Work 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 renditions, marked but whole, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, drained 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 seen – scarred, but enduring. I stared at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a political act”, but I had never felt the complete significance 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 carry stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else falls away. It is a persistent, determined declination to disappear.