Within the Devastated Remains of an Residential Building, I Saw a Book I Had Rendered

Among the debris of a destroyed apartment block, a solitary sight lingered with me: a tome I had converted from English to Farsi, lying partly concealed in dust and ash. Its front was ripped and dirtied, its leaves bent and scorched, but it was still decipherable. Still uttering words.

A Metropolis Amid Assault

Two days earlier, projectiles began striking the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, violent detonations. The digital network was entirely disconnected. I was in my flat, rendering a book about what it means to transport language across tongues, and the principles and anxieties of inhabiting a different perspective. As edifices collapsed, I sat editing a text that contended, in its quiet way, for the persistence of significance.

Everything stopped. A book my publisher had been about to go to print was stranded when the printing house shut down. Bookstores closed one by one. One night, when the explosions were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the library in my apartment, holding lexicons, valuable editions I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. 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 safer locations – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a photo: in the faraway, a industrial site was ablaze, thick smoke spiraling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to chase them.

During those days, moods moved through the city like a front: sudden dread, apprehension, moral outrage at the wrong, then detachment. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and references that translation demands.

Outside, concussive forces blew windows from their casings; at a relative's house, every pane was broken, the belongings lay damaged, household items scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an stand, refusing to let silence and dirt have the final say.

Converting Sorrow

A picture was shared digitally of a young artist who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her writing went spread rapidly next to her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman hurrying between alleys, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some buried recollection. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: changing destruction into art, demise into verse, grief into quest.

The Work as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself working on a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet continued working until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all longed for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth pursuing.

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

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his prison cell, asking for more resources, insisting that linguistic work become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, goal, discipline, anchor, and metaphor” all at once.

A Scarred Voice

And then came the picture. I noticed it on a website and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, damaged but whole, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been devoid of color, drained of life among the debris and debris. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but persisting.

I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a political act”, but I had never felt the full weight of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, stubborn rejection to vanish.