Among the debris of a fallen structure, a solitary sight lingered with me: a tome I had converted from the English language to Farsi, lying partially covered in dirt and soot. Its front was torn and stained, its pages bent and scorched, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking.
Two days earlier, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no sirens, just unexpected, forceful blasts. The web was entirely cut off. I was in my residence, working on a work about what it means to transport text across languages, and the morals and anxieties of taking on another’s perspective. As edifices came down, I sat revising a text that contended, in its understated way, for the endurance of meaning.
Everything ceased. A book my publishing house had been about to publish was stuck when the facility ceased operations. Retailers shut one by one. One night, when the booms were too close, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop worrying about the bookshelves in my apartment, holding lexicons, rare editions I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That library was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.
My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be safer areas – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a photo: in the distance, a factory was ablaze, dark smoke coiling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and peril seemed to chase them.
During those days, feelings passed over the city like a front: instant terror, apprehension, righteous anger at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the emotional toll, the attack destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and materials that the craft demands.
Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the possessions lay broken, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, creating at an stand, declining to let quiet and dust have the final say.
A photograph circulated on social media of a young writer who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her writing went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an older woman hurrying between alleys, 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 recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home.
We were all transforming, in our own way: turning ruin into image, loss into poetry, sorrow into longing.
A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself working on a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will get better 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 working until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all yearned for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth pursuing.
During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond literary craft: it was an act of resistance, of holding one's ground, of holding on.
One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that language study become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, goal, rigor, support, and metaphor” all at once.
And then came the picture. I saw it on a platform and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, damaged but surviving, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, drained of life among the rubble and ruins. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but persisting.
I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else disappears. It is a persistent, stubborn declination to disappear.
Elara Vance is a dedicated MapleStory enthusiast and gaming writer, known for creating in-depth guides and staying updated on game mechanics.
