Among the debris of a collapsed structure, a solitary image stayed with me: a volume I had rendered from English to Persian, lying partly concealed in dirt and soot. Its front was torn and stained, its pages bent and scorched, but it was still legible. Still uttering words.
A Metropolis During Assault
Two days earlier, projectiles began striking the city. There were no alarms, just sudden, forceful detonations. The digital network was entirely severed. I was in my flat, working on a work about what it means to transport language across cultures, and the principles and concerns of taking on someone else's perspective. As edifices fell, I sat editing a text that argued, in its quiet way, for the endurance of significance.
Everything stopped. A book my publishing house had been about to go to print was stranded when the facility closed. Retailers closed one by one. One night, when the explosions were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, filled with lexicons, valuable books I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.
Dispersal and Grief
My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous areas – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the distance, a industrial site was on fire, dark smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and danger seemed to chase them.
During those days, emotions passed over the city like a front: instant fear, apprehension, indignation at the unfairness, then numbness. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant look-ups and references that translation demands.
Outside, blast waves ripped windows from their sashes; at a family member's house, every window was broken, the belongings lay broken, personal effects 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 Pain
A photograph spread on social media of a 23-year-old artist who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her poem went viral with her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman dashing between alleys, shouting a name. People said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some deep-seated remembrance. She was seeking a child who would never come home.
We were all translating, in our own way: turning ruin into image, demise into lines, sorrow into search.
Translation as Defiance
A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by 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 experienced the loss of his sight yet continued creating until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all desired – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth reaching toward.
During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than literary craft: it was an act of defiance, of staying put, of enduring.
One day, in full 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 reality, goal, rigor, foundation, and symbol” all at once.
A Scarred Work
And then came the photograph. I noticed it on a news site and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, marked but whole, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, stripped of life among the concrete and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but enduring.
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 attack, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, stubborn refusal to disappear.
