Within the rubble of a collapsed structure, a solitary vision lingered with me: a tome I had rendered from the English language to Persian, lying partly concealed in dirt and soot. Its front was shredded and dirtied, its sheets bent and scorched, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking.
Two days prior, rockets commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just sudden, violent detonations. The internet was totally cut off. I was in my flat, working on a work about what it means to transport words across languages, and the principles and concerns of taking on a different voice. As edifices fell, I sat polishing a text that contended, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of significance.
Everything halted. A book my publisher had been about to publish was halted when the printer shut down. Shops closed one by one. One night, when the booms were too nearby, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, filled with lexicons, valuable volumes I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.
My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be safer locations – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a picture: in the background, a factory was burning, thick smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly somewhere else, and danger seemed to pursue them.
During those days, moods swept through the city like weather: instant fear, unease, righteous anger at the wrong, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick queries and references that the craft demands.
Outside, concussive forces blew windows from their sashes; at a family member's house, every pane was destroyed, the belongings lay broken, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an stand, choosing not to let quiet and dust have the final say.
A image was shared online of a 23-year-old writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her poem went was widely shared next to her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an older woman dashing between passages, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some deep-seated remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.
We were all translating, in our own way: changing ruin into image, loss into verse, mourning into search.
A week after the attacks began, still amidst ruin, I found myself rendering a fable about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound 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 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 perseverance, of remaining, of enduring.
One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his confinement, asking for more resources, insisting that language study become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, aspiration, practice, anchor, and metaphor” all at once.
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 works, damaged but intact, my name printed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been black and white, devoid of life among the rubble and debris. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – 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 true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice had significance”. 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 quiet, unyielding rejection to disappear.
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