Within those Devastated Remains of an Residential Building, I Saw a Volume I’d Translated

In the rubble of a destroyed building, a single sight remained with me: a tome I had converted from English to Farsi, lying partially covered in dust and ash. Its front was shredded and smudged, its leaves bent and scorched, but it was still legible. Still uttering words.

An Urban Center Under Bombardment

Two days prior, missiles commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, powerful explosions. The internet was totally severed. I was in my apartment, rendering a work about what it means to carry language across languages, and the principles and anxieties of taking on another’s voice. As structures fell, I sat revising a text that argued, in its quiet way, for the persistence of meaning.

Everything stopped. A project my publisher had been about to go to print was halted when the printing house closed. Shops shut one by one. One night, when the explosions were too imminent, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop worrying about the bookshelves in my apartment, stocked with reference books, rare books I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Distance and Loss

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be safer 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 faraway, a industrial site was burning, dark smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like a front: swift fear, anxiety, indignation at the injustice, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant look-ups and sources that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces ripped windows from their sashes; at a family member's house, every window was destroyed, the furniture lay ruined, objects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an stand, declining to let silence and debris have the final say.

Translating Grief

A photograph spread on social media of a young artist who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her poem went viral with her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an older woman dashing between alleyways, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some buried memory. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: transforming ruin into art, death into verse, sorrow into quest.

The Work as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself rendering a fable about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet continued working until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth striving for.

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

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his prison cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that translation become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, aspiration, discipline, support, and symbol” all at once.

An Enduring Work

And then came the image. I noticed it on a platform and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, marked but intact, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, devoid of life among the debris and wreckage. 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 political act”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else falls away. It is a quiet, stubborn declination to vanish.