Within the Ruined Remains of an Residential Building, I Found a Volume I Had Rendered

In the rubble of a fallen building, a solitary image remained with me: a book I had converted from the English language to Farsi, sitting half-buried in dust and ash. Its jacket was torn and smudged, its sheets bent and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still uttering words.

An Urban Center Under Attack

Two days before, rockets started hitting the city. There were no sirens, just unexpected, powerful blasts. The digital network was totally disconnected. I was in my apartment, working on a book about what it means to move language across cultures, and the ethics and concerns of inhabiting someone else's narrative. As edifices came down, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its quiet way, for the persistence of meaning.

Everything halted. A project my publishing house had been about to go to print was stranded when the printing house shut down. Retailers shut one by one. One night, when the explosions were too nearby, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, stocked with reference books, rare books 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 make it through the night.

Separation and Loss

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous towns – 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 image: in the faraway, a plant was on fire, dark smoke spiraling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and danger seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions passed over the city like weather: instant terror, apprehension, indignation at the wrong, then detachment. Beyond the personal impact, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate queries and sources that the work demands.

Outside, blast waves tore windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every window was destroyed, the belongings lay broken, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an stand, declining to let stillness and dirt have the last word.

Transforming Grief

A picture spread digitally of a young writer who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared with her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an elderly woman dashing between passages, yelling a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some repressed memory. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: changing devastation into image, loss into poetry, grief into quest.

The Work as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself rendering a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted creating until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all longed for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth reaching toward.

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

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker 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, practice, foundation, and symbol” all at once.

An Enduring Voice

And then came the picture. I saw it on a website and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, marked but whole, 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 invisible, 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 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 carry stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, unyielding declination to disappear.