Among those Ruined Remains of an Residential Building, I Saw a Volume I’d Translated

Within the wreckage of a fallen apartment block, a particular vision stayed with me: a volume I had translated from the English language to Persian, resting partially covered in dirt and soot. Its front was ripped and dirtied, its sheets curled and burned, but it was still readable. Still communicating.

A City Under Assault

Two days earlier, rockets commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, powerful explosions. The internet was completely disconnected. I was in my residence, working on a text about what it means to carry text across tongues, and the morals and concerns of inhabiting a different narrative. As edifices came down, I sat revising a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything stopped. A book my publisher had been about to send to press was stranded when the printing house shut down. Bookstores closed one by one. One night, when the booms were too nearby, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, hard-to-find editions I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Separation and Grief

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous locations – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a photo: in the background, a plant was burning, black smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly somewhere else, and peril seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods swept through the city like a storm: sudden dread, unease, righteous anger at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick queries and sources that the craft demands.

Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every window was broken, the belongings lay ruined, household items scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an stand, refusing to let quiet and dust have the ultimate victory.

Translating Pain

A photograph was shared online of a 23-year-old poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an elderly woman hurrying between alleyways, calling a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some deep-seated remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

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

Translation as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still amidst destruction, I found myself working on a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet persisted creating until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all longed for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth striving for.

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

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 fact, aspiration, discipline, anchor, and metaphor” 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 renditions, damaged but surviving, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, drained of life among the debris and debris. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but persisting.

I stared at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a act with consequences”, but I had never felt the true gravity 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 transport stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else falls away. It is a subtle, stubborn declination to disappear.