Amid the Ruined Remains of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Book I Had Translated
Among the wreckage of a fallen apartment block, a single vision lingered with me: a book I had translated from the English language to Farsi, sitting partially covered in dust and soot. Its front was ripped and stained, its leaves bent and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating.
A Metropolis During Bombardment
Two days before, projectiles started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, powerful explosions. The web was entirely cut off. I was in my apartment, working on a text about what it means to move text across cultures, and the ethics and anxieties of inhabiting someone else's voice. As edifices collapsed, I sat revising a text that contended, in its understated way, for the persistence of significance.
Everything halted. A book my publishing house had been about to go to print was stuck when the facility closed. Bookstores locked their doors one by one. One night, when the explosions were too close, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the library in my apartment, filled with dictionaries, rare books I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.
Distance and Grief
My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous locations – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a photo: in the faraway, a plant was ablaze, thick smoke spiraling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to follow them.
During those days, emotions passed over the city like weather: instant fear, apprehension, righteous anger at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the emotional toll, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick look-ups and references that the work demands.
Outside, blast waves blew windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the belongings lay damaged, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, working at an easel, choosing not to let silence and dirt have the final say.
Converting Sorrow
A picture spread online of a young artist who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went was widely shared next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman hurrying between alleys, shouting a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some deep-seated memory. She was searching for a child who would never come home.
We were all translating, in our own way: turning devastation into art, death into poetry, grief into quest.
The Work as Persistence
A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of ruin, I found myself working on a fable about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet kept working until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all desired – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth reaching toward.
During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond a skill: it was an act of perseverance, of holding one's ground, of holding on.
One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his confinement, asking for more books, insisting that linguistic work become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, hope, practice, foundation, and metaphor” all at once.
An Enduring Work
And then came the image. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, scarred but whole, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been devoid of color, stripped of life among the rubble and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but surviving.
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 complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, determined declination to be silenced.