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

Within the wreckage of a collapsed building, a particular vision lingered with me: a book I had converted from the English language to Farsi, lying half-buried in dirt and ash. Its cover was torn and dirtied, its sheets curled and singed, 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 unexpected, violent detonations. The digital network was entirely cut off. I was in my residence, rendering a work about what it means to move language across tongues, and the ethics and concerns of inhabiting someone else's narrative. As edifices came down, I sat editing a text that contended, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to publish was halted when the facility ceased operations. Shops closed one by one. One night, when the explosions were too nearby, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the bookshelves in my apartment, filled with reference books, valuable volumes I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Separation and Loss

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be safer towns – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a picture: in the background, a industrial site was ablaze, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, moods passed over the city like a storm: instant fear, apprehension, moral outrage at the unfairness, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate queries and sources that translation demands.

Outside, concussive forces ripped windows from their sashes; at a relative's house, every pane was broken, the furniture lay broken, objects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an stand, choosing not to let silence and debris have the final say.

Converting Sorrow

A picture circulated online of a 23-year-old writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared next to her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an elderly woman running between alleyways, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

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

The Work as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of destruction, I found myself rendering a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet persisted producing until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all longed for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than literary craft: it was an act of perseverance, of remaining, of persisting.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his prison cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that translation become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, aspiration, discipline, anchor, and analogy” all at once.

A Scarred Legacy

And then came the photograph. I noticed it on a platform and saw that, among 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 colour, but it might as well have been devoid of color, stripped of life among the concrete and ruins. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – 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 true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a subtle, determined declination to vanish.