Within the debris of a destroyed apartment block, a single vision remained with me: a volume I had rendered from English to Farsi, resting partially covered in dust and soot. Its front was torn and stained, its leaves curled and singed, but it was still legible. Still uttering words.
Two days earlier, missiles commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just sudden, violent explosions. The digital network was entirely disconnected. I was in my flat, translating a book about what it means to transport words across tongues, and the principles and anxieties of inhabiting another’s perspective. As structures came down, I sat polishing a text that contended, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of purpose.
Everything halted. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to go to print was stranded when the printing house ceased operations. Bookstores shut 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 shelves in my apartment, filled with lexicons, rare volumes I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That library was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.
My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure locations – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a picture: in the background, a factory was on fire, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to follow them.
During those days, moods swept through the city like a front: instant fear, apprehension, moral outrage at the injustice, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and materials that translation demands.
Outside, blast waves blew windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every window was shattered, the possessions lay broken, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an easel, refusing to let stillness and dust have the last word.
A photograph spread on social media of a young poet who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her writing went was widely shared next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an older woman hurrying between alleys, yelling a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some buried recollection. She was looking for a child who would never come home.
We were all transforming, in our own way: transforming ruin into picture, demise into verse, grief into quest.
A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of devastation, I found myself rendering a fable about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can hold 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 striving for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth striving for.
During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond literary craft: it was an act of resistance, of remaining, of enduring.
One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his confinement, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that linguistic work become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, hope, practice, anchor, and analogy” all at once.
And then came the photograph. I noticed it on a website and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, scarred but whole, my name printed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been black and white, drained of life among the concrete and ruins. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but surviving.
I stared at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a political act”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else falls away. It is a subtle, unyielding declination to be silenced.
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