Within the debris of a destroyed apartment block, a solitary image remained with me: a volume I had rendered from English to Persian, sitting partially covered in dirt and ash. Its jacket was torn and stained, its pages curled and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still uttering words.
Two days earlier, rockets began striking the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, powerful detonations. The digital network was totally cut off. I was in my residence, rendering a text about what it means to carry words across cultures, and the morals and concerns of occupying a different perspective. As structures collapsed, I sat revising a text that suggested, in its quiet way, for the endurance of purpose.
Everything stopped. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to publish was stranded when the printing house shut down. Retailers closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the bookshelves in my apartment, stocked with lexicons, valuable editions I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.
My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous locations – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a image: in the distance, a factory was burning, thick smoke spiraling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and danger seemed to pursue them.
During those days, moods moved through the city like a storm: swift fear, anxiety, righteous anger at the injustice, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the bombardment destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick look-ups and references that the craft demands.
Outside, blast waves blew windows from their casings; at a relative's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the furniture lay damaged, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, painting at an easel, refusing to let quiet and dust have the ultimate victory.
A image spread on social media of a 23-year-old poet 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 aged woman dashing between passages, calling a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried memory. She was searching for a child who would never come home.
We were all transforming, in our own way: changing destruction into art, loss into poetry, mourning into quest.
A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself working on a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant 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 yearned for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth striving for.
During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than literary craft: it was an act of perseverance, of staying put, of holding on.
One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his cell, asking for more books, insisting that language study become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, goal, discipline, anchor, and analogy” all at once.
And then came the photograph. I spotted it on a website and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, scarred but intact, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, stripped of life among the debris and debris. For most of my career, I had been invisible, 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 act with consequences”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else falls away. It is a subtle, determined declination to vanish.
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