Among the wreckage of a fallen apartment block, a single vision stayed with me: a volume I had rendered from English to Persian, resting partly concealed in dirt and ash. Its jacket was shredded and dirtied, its sheets curled and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking.
Two days before, missiles started hitting the city. There were no sirens, just sudden, powerful detonations. The digital network was totally severed. I was in my flat, translating a text about what it means to carry text across tongues, and the morals and worries of inhabiting someone else's perspective. As structures collapsed, I sat revising a text that argued, in its subtle way, for the persistence of significance.
Everything halted. A book my publishing house had been about to publish was stuck when the printer ceased operations. Retailers closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too nearby, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop worrying about the bookshelves in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, 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 endure the night.
My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be safer locations – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a image: in the background, a factory was on fire, thick smoke coiling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to follow them.
During those days, emotions passed over the city like a front: instant fear, anxiety, indignation at the injustice, then apathy. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick queries and references that the craft demands.
Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every window was destroyed, the furniture lay damaged, objects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, creating at an easel, choosing not to let quiet and dust have the ultimate victory.
A image spread on social media of a 23-year-old artist who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her writing went spread rapidly next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an older woman hurrying between passages, yelling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some repressed recollection. She was seeking a child who would never come home.
We were all transforming, in our own way: changing destruction into art, death into poetry, grief into longing.
A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself rendering a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will recover 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 kept working until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all longed for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth pursuing.
During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than literary craft: 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 prison cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that translation become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, aspiration, discipline, anchor, and symbol” all at once.
And then came the picture. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, scarred but surviving, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, stripped of life among the debris and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but surviving.
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 was important”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else falls away. It is a persistent, unyielding rejection to vanish.
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