Among those Devastated Remains of an Residential Building, I Found a Volume I’d Rendered
Within the rubble of a fallen structure, a single image lingered with me: a volume I had rendered from English to Persian, resting half-buried in dust and ash. Its jacket was shredded and smudged, its pages bent and singed, but it was still readable. Still speaking.
An Urban Center Amid Attack
Two days before, projectiles started hitting the city. There were no sirens, just sudden, violent blasts. The internet was totally cut off. I was in my flat, working on a text about what it means to carry language across cultures, and the ethics and worries of occupying another’s perspective. As structures fell, I sat polishing a text that argued, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of meaning.
Everything stopped. A book my publishing house had been about to publish was stranded when the printer shut down. Retailers shut one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the library in my apartment, holding reference books, valuable books 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 make it through the night.
Separation and Loss
My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be safer areas – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a photo: in the faraway, a industrial site was ablaze, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and danger seemed to follow them.
During those days, feelings moved through the city like a front: sudden terror, anxiety, righteous anger at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and references that the craft demands.
Outside, concussive forces ripped windows from their sashes; at a relative's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the belongings lay ruined, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an easel, declining to let stillness and dust have the final say.
Converting Sorrow
A picture was shared digitally of a 23-year-old poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly next to her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman hurrying between passages, shouting a name. People said she had lost a son in a conflict 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 translating, in our own way: turning destruction into image, demise into lines, grief into quest.
The Craft as Resistance
A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself working on a fable about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet continued creating until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all longed for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward.
During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond a skill: it was an act of defiance, of holding one's ground, of enduring.
One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his cell, asking for more resources, insisting that translation become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, goal, discipline, anchor, and symbol” all at once.
A Marked Legacy
And then came the photograph. I noticed it on a website and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, marked but surviving, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, devoid of life among the concrete and ruins. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but persisting.
I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a act with consequences”, but I had never felt the full weight of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a subtle, unyielding rejection to disappear.