Within the rubble of a collapsed apartment block, a solitary vision lingered with me: a volume I had translated from the English language to Persian, resting half-buried in dust and ash. Its jacket was torn and stained, its sheets bent and singed, but it was still legible. Still uttering words.
A Metropolis During Attack
Two days earlier, rockets began striking the city. There were no alarms, just sudden, powerful blasts. The internet was entirely disconnected. I was in my residence, translating a book about what it means to transport text across cultures, and the morals and concerns of occupying another’s voice. As buildings came down, I sat polishing a text that contended, in its subtle way, for the endurance of meaning.
Everything halted. A manuscript my publisher had been about to publish was stranded when the printing house ceased operations. Shops locked their doors one by one. One night, when the booms were too close, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the bookshelves in my apartment, filled with dictionaries, valuable volumes I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That library was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.
Distance and Loss
My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be safer towns – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a photo: in the faraway, a plant was burning, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly somewhere else, and danger seemed to chase them.
During those days, emotions moved through the city like weather: instant terror, anxiety, righteous anger at the unfairness, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the attack destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate searches and references that translation demands.
Outside, blast waves tore windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every window was shattered, the possessions lay ruined, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, creating at an stand, choosing not to let silence and debris have the ultimate victory.
Transforming Grief
A picture circulated digitally of a 23-year-old poet who was died when missiles struck a building. Her poem went viral with her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an elderly woman hurrying between alleyways, shouting a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried recollection. She was seeking a child who would never come home.
We were all converting, in our own way: changing destruction into picture, death into poetry, mourning into search.
The Work as Persistence
A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by ruin, I found myself translating a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted creating until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all desired – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth pursuing.
During those nights, I understood translation as something more than a skill: it was an act of defiance, of staying put, of holding on.
One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his cell, asking for more resources, insisting that linguistic work become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, goal, discipline, foundation, and analogy” all at once.
A Scarred Work
And then came the picture. I saw it on a website and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, marked but intact, my name displayed 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 debris. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but enduring.
I looked 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 fire, 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 persist when everything else falls away. It is a subtle, unyielding rejection to vanish.
