Amid the Devastated Debris of an Residential Building, I Saw a Book I Had Translated

Within the rubble of a collapsed apartment block, a particular vision lingered with me: a tome I had converted from the English language to Farsi, resting partly concealed in dust and ash. Its cover was shredded and stained, its leaves bent and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still uttering words.

A Metropolis During Attack

Two days prior, rockets commenced attacking the city. There were no sirens, just abrupt, violent detonations. The digital network was totally disconnected. I was in my apartment, rendering a text about what it means to move text across cultures, and the morals and worries of occupying a different voice. As buildings fell, I sat revising a text that suggested, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything stopped. A project my publishing house had been about to go to print was stuck when the printer shut down. Retailers 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 dwelling on the bookshelves in my apartment, holding lexicons, valuable volumes I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That library was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Dispersal and Devastation

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous locations – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a photo: in the background, a factory was burning, dark smoke coiling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and danger seemed to chase them.

During those days, moods swept through the city like a storm: sudden dread, anxiety, righteous anger at the injustice, then detachment. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant look-ups and sources that translation demands.

Outside, concussive forces blew windows from their casings; at a family member's house, every window was destroyed, the belongings lay broken, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an stand, refusing to let quiet and debris have the last word.

Converting Sorrow

A photograph circulated on social media of a 23-year-old artist who was died when missiles struck a building. Her poem went spread rapidly alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an elderly woman hurrying between passages, calling a name. People said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some repressed recollection. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: transforming ruin into image, loss into lines, mourning into longing.

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of destruction, I found myself working on a fable about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet kept working until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all yearned for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond a skill: it was an act of resistance, of holding one's ground, of persisting.

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

A Marked Voice

And then came the photograph. I saw it on a news site and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, scarred but surviving, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been devoid of color, devoid of life among the rubble and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but persisting.

I gazed upon 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 erased. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else disappears. It is a subtle, determined rejection to vanish.