🔗 Share this article Among those Devastated Remains of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Volume I’d Rendered Within the debris of a fallen apartment block, a solitary sight remained with me: a volume I had rendered from English to Farsi, sitting half-buried in dust and ash. Its cover was shredded and smudged, its pages curled and burned, but it was still legible. Still uttering words. A City Under Attack Two days prior, missiles started hitting the city. There were no sirens, just abrupt, powerful blasts. The web was entirely cut off. I was in my residence, translating a book about what it means to transport text across tongues, and the morals and anxieties of occupying another’s narrative. As buildings collapsed, I sat editing a text that contended, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of significance. Everything ceased. A project my publishing house had been about to send to press was stuck when the facility closed. Retailers locked their doors one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop worrying about the library in my apartment, holding reference books, hard-to-find books I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night. Dispersal and Devastation My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure locations – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a picture: in the background, a plant was burning, dark smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and danger seemed to chase them. During those days, feelings passed over the city like a storm: instant dread, unease, indignation at the wrong, then numbness. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate queries and materials that the work demands. Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their casings; at a family member's house, every pane was destroyed, the possessions lay ruined, objects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an stand, refusing to let stillness and dust have the last word. Converting Pain A photograph was shared online of a young artist who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her writing went was widely shared next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman hurrying between alleys, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some repressed memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home. We were all translating, in our own way: transforming destruction into picture, death into lines, mourning into longing. The Work as Persistence A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself translating a fable about a king whose daughter will heal 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 persisted working until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all desired – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth striving for. During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than a skill: it was an act of defiance, 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 leader in his cell, 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 metaphor” all at once. A Marked Work And then came the image. I saw it on a news site and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, scarred but intact, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, devoid of life among the concrete and ruins. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but persisting. I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the full weight of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else falls away. It is a subtle, determined declination to disappear.
Within the debris of a fallen apartment block, a solitary sight remained with me: a volume I had rendered from English to Farsi, sitting half-buried in dust and ash. Its cover was shredded and smudged, its pages curled and burned, but it was still legible. Still uttering words. A City Under Attack Two days prior, missiles started hitting the city. There were no sirens, just abrupt, powerful blasts. The web was entirely cut off. I was in my residence, translating a book about what it means to transport text across tongues, and the morals and anxieties of occupying another’s narrative. As buildings collapsed, I sat editing a text that contended, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of significance. Everything ceased. A project my publishing house had been about to send to press was stuck when the facility closed. Retailers locked their doors one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop worrying about the library in my apartment, holding reference books, hard-to-find books I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night. Dispersal and Devastation My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure locations – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a picture: in the background, a plant was burning, dark smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and danger seemed to chase them. During those days, feelings passed over the city like a storm: instant dread, unease, indignation at the wrong, then numbness. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate queries and materials that the work demands. Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their casings; at a family member's house, every pane was destroyed, the possessions lay ruined, objects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an stand, refusing to let stillness and dust have the last word. Converting Pain A photograph was shared online of a young artist who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her writing went was widely shared next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman hurrying between alleys, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some repressed memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home. We were all translating, in our own way: transforming destruction into picture, death into lines, mourning into longing. The Work as Persistence A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself translating a fable about a king whose daughter will heal 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 persisted working until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all desired – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth striving for. During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than a skill: it was an act of defiance, 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 leader in his cell, 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 metaphor” all at once. A Marked Work And then came the image. I saw it on a news site and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, scarred but intact, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, devoid of life among the concrete and ruins. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but persisting. I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the full weight of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else falls away. It is a subtle, determined declination to disappear.