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

Within the debris of a collapsed building, a solitary vision lingered with me: a tome I had rendered from the English language to Farsi, sitting half-buried in dust and soot. Its front was torn and dirtied, its pages curled and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still uttering words.

A Metropolis Amid Bombardment

Two days prior, rockets started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, powerful detonations. The internet was completely cut off. I was in my apartment, working on a work about what it means to carry text across tongues, and the principles and worries of taking on someone else's perspective. As structures fell, I sat revising a text that argued, in its understated way, for the persistence of significance.

Everything halted. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to publish was stuck when the printer shut down. Shops locked their doors one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the library in my apartment, filled with dictionaries, hard-to-find volumes I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That library 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 towns – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a picture: in the distance, a plant was ablaze, dark smoke curling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and threat seemed to pursue them.

During those days, moods moved through the city like a front: swift dread, apprehension, indignation at the wrong, then apathy. Beyond the emotional toll, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant look-ups and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, blast waves blew windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the furniture lay broken, personal effects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an easel, declining to let quiet and dust have the last word.

Translating Grief

A photograph was shared digitally of a 23-year-old writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman hurrying between passages, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some repressed remembrance. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: changing destruction into image, demise into verse, grief into search.

Translation as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself working on a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted producing until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all longed for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than a skill: it was an act of perseverance, of remaining, of enduring.

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

An Enduring Work

And then came the picture. I saw it on a news site and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, scarred but intact, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, stripped 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 apparent – scarred, but enduring.

I gazed upon 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 had significance”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else falls away. It is a quiet, unyielding rejection to be silenced.