đ Share this article Among the Devastated Debris of an Residential Building, I Found a Volume I Had Rendered Within the debris of a collapsed structure, a solitary vision lingered with me: a volume I had translated from English to Persian, resting partially covered in dust and soot. Its jacket was shredded and stained, its pages bent and burned, but it was still readable. Still speaking. A City Under Assault Two days before, projectiles started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, forceful explosions. The internet was entirely cut off. I was in my apartment, rendering a work about what it means to move words across tongues, and the ethics and anxieties of inhabiting someone else's narrative. As structures fell, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its quiet way, for the endurance of meaning. Everything halted. A project my publishing house had been about to publish was halted when the printer shut down. Bookstores locked their doors one by one. One night, when the booms were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the basement. I couldnât stop thinking about the library in my apartment, holding reference books, hard-to-find books I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That library was my lifework, and I didnât know if I, or it, would endure the night. Distance and Devastation My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous areas â 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 image: in the distance, a factory was on fire, thick smoke spiraling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to follow them. During those days, emotions moved through the city like a front: swift dread, anxiety, indignation at the wrong, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the attack destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick queries and materials that the craft demands. Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every window was shattered, the belongings lay damaged, objects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an stand, declining to let quiet and dirt have the ultimate victory. Converting Grief A picture circulated online of a 23-year-old writer who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went viral alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an elderly woman dashing between alleys, yelling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some deep-seated recollection. She was seeking a child who would never come home. We were all converting, in our own way: turning destruction into picture, loss into verse, sorrow into search. The Craft as Resistance A week after the attacks began, still amidst destruction, I found myself rendering a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant 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 tranquility we all longed for â seemingly out of reach, yet still worth reaching toward. During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond a skill: it was an act of defiance, of remaining, of enduring. 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 books, insisting that language study become his âprimary activityâ. For him, translation was â as the author puts it â âa fact, goal, discipline, support, and metaphorâ all at once. An Enduring Voice And then came the photograph. I spotted it on a website and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, scarred but whole, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, drained of life among the rubble and debris. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible â scarred, but persisting. I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that âall translation is a political actâ, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: âthis voice had significanceâ. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else falls away. It is a persistent, determined declination to disappear.
Within the debris of a collapsed structure, a solitary vision lingered with me: a volume I had translated from English to Persian, resting partially covered in dust and soot. Its jacket was shredded and stained, its pages bent and burned, but it was still readable. Still speaking. A City Under Assault Two days before, projectiles started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, forceful explosions. The internet was entirely cut off. I was in my apartment, rendering a work about what it means to move words across tongues, and the ethics and anxieties of inhabiting someone else's narrative. As structures fell, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its quiet way, for the endurance of meaning. Everything halted. A project my publishing house had been about to publish was halted when the printer shut down. Bookstores locked their doors one by one. One night, when the booms were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the basement. I couldnât stop thinking about the library in my apartment, holding reference books, hard-to-find books I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That library was my lifework, and I didnât know if I, or it, would endure the night. Distance and Devastation My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous areas â 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 image: in the distance, a factory was on fire, thick smoke spiraling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to follow them. During those days, emotions moved through the city like a front: swift dread, anxiety, indignation at the wrong, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the attack destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick queries and materials that the craft demands. Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every window was shattered, the belongings lay damaged, objects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an stand, declining to let quiet and dirt have the ultimate victory. Converting Grief A picture circulated online of a 23-year-old writer who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went viral alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an elderly woman dashing between alleys, yelling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some deep-seated recollection. She was seeking a child who would never come home. We were all converting, in our own way: turning destruction into picture, loss into verse, sorrow into search. The Craft as Resistance A week after the attacks began, still amidst destruction, I found myself rendering a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant 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 tranquility we all longed for â seemingly out of reach, yet still worth reaching toward. During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond a skill: it was an act of defiance, of remaining, of enduring. 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 books, insisting that language study become his âprimary activityâ. For him, translation was â as the author puts it â âa fact, goal, discipline, support, and metaphorâ all at once. An Enduring Voice And then came the photograph. I spotted it on a website and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, scarred but whole, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, drained of life among the rubble and debris. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible â scarred, but persisting. I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that âall translation is a political actâ, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: âthis voice had significanceâ. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else falls away. It is a persistent, determined declination to disappear.