Within the Ruined Remains of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Volume I Had Translated

In the rubble of a destroyed apartment block, a single vision stayed with me: a book I had rendered from the English language to Farsi, sitting partially covered in dust and soot. Its front was torn and dirtied, its pages curled and scorched, but it was still decipherable. Still uttering words.

A City Amid Attack

Two days earlier, projectiles started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, forceful blasts. The digital network was completely disconnected. I was in my residence, rendering a book about what it means to carry language across tongues, and the principles and worries of inhabiting a different voice. As buildings fell, I sat revising a text that argued, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything ceased. A manuscript my publisher had been about to send to press was halted when the printing house closed. Retailers locked their doors one by one. One night, when the blasts were too nearby, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, stocked with reference books, hard-to-find volumes I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That library was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Separation and Grief

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure locations – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a photo: in the distance, a industrial site was on fire, thick smoke spiraling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, feelings swept through the city like a storm: swift terror, unease, indignation at the injustice, then apathy. Beyond the personal impact, the bombardment destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and references that translation demands.

Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their frames; at a relative's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the furniture lay damaged, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an stand, choosing not to let stillness and dirt have the last word.

Converting Pain

A picture spread on social media of a 23-year-old poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her poem went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an older woman dashing between alleyways, shouting a name. People said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried recollection. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: turning ruin into art, death into poetry, sorrow into quest.

The Work as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of ruin, I found myself translating a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet continued creating until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all longed for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than a skill: it was an act of resistance, of staying put, of enduring.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his confinement, asking for more books, insisting that language study become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, hope, rigor, support, and symbol” all at once.

A Scarred Legacy

And then came the photograph. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, damaged but whole, my name printed 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 wreckage. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but enduring.

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 bombardment, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else crumbles. It is a subtle, stubborn declination to be silenced.