Among the wreckage of a collapsed building, a particular vision stayed with me: a tome I had converted from English to Farsi, resting half-buried in dust and soot. Its jacket was shredded and dirtied, its leaves bent and scorched, but it was still decipherable. Still uttering words.
A Metropolis Under Bombardment
Two days before, missiles began striking the city. There were no warnings, just sudden, forceful blasts. The digital network was totally severed. I was in my flat, translating a text about what it means to move words across tongues, and the principles and worries of taking on someone else's narrative. As buildings came down, I sat polishing a text that contended, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of purpose.
Everything ceased. A project my publishing house had been about to publish was halted when the printer ceased operations. Shops closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop worrying about the bookshelves in my apartment, filled with dictionaries, hard-to-find books I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.
Separation and Loss
My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous areas – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a industrial site was on fire, thick smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly elsewhere, and danger seemed to follow them.
During those days, feelings passed over the city like weather: swift fear, unease, righteous anger at the injustice, then detachment. Beyond the emotional toll, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick look-ups and materials that the work demands.
Outside, blast waves tore windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every window was shattered, the possessions lay ruined, household items scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an easel, refusing to let silence and debris have the ultimate victory.
Converting Sorrow
A picture circulated on social media of a 23-year-old artist who was died when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an aged woman hurrying between passages, calling a name. People said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home.
We were all transforming, in our own way: changing devastation into picture, demise into verse, sorrow into quest.
Translation as Resistance
A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of devastation, I found myself translating a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will get better 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 producing until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unreachable. 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 beyond a skill: it was an act of perseverance, of holding one's ground, of persisting.
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 dictionaries, insisting that translation become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, goal, practice, support, and analogy” all at once.
An Enduring Work
And then came the image. I spotted it on a website and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, scarred but intact, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, stripped of life among the rubble and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but surviving.
I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a act with consequences”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else falls away. It is a persistent, stubborn refusal to vanish.
