Amid the Ruined Remains of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Book I’d Translated

Within the debris of a collapsed structure, a particular image lingered with me: a tome I had converted from the English language to Farsi, resting partially covered in dust and ash. Its cover was torn and stained, its leaves bent and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating.

A City Under Attack

Two days before, projectiles started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, violent detonations. The digital network was totally severed. I was in my flat, working on a text about what it means to carry language across cultures, and the principles and anxieties of taking on someone else's narrative. As edifices fell, I sat revising a text that contended, in its understated way, for the persistence of purpose.

Everything ceased. A book my publisher had been about to send to press 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 rushed down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop thinking about the shelves in my apartment, holding lexicons, hard-to-find volumes I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Separation and Grief

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous towns – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a picture: in the faraway, a industrial site was burning, thick smoke curling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like a front: instant dread, anxiety, indignation at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the personal impact, the attack eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick look-ups and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces ripped windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the furniture lay damaged, personal effects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an stand, declining to let silence and dust have the ultimate victory.

Transforming Sorrow

A picture was shared on social media of a young writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an aged woman dashing between alleys, yelling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some deep-seated remembrance. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: turning destruction into picture, death into poetry, mourning into longing.

The Craft as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst devastation, I found myself translating a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will get better 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 persisted working 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 – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than an art form: it was an act of resistance, of holding one's ground, of enduring.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his confinement, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that translation become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, hope, rigor, anchor, and metaphor” all at once.

A Scarred Work

And then came the image. I noticed it on a website and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, scarred but surviving, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been devoid of color, stripped of life among the rubble and debris. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, 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 complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, determined declination to vanish.