Within the Ruined Remains of an Residential Building, I Saw a Volume I’d Translated

In the wreckage of a destroyed building, a solitary vision remained with me: a book I had converted from the English language to Farsi, lying partially covered in dirt and soot. Its front was torn and smudged, its pages curled and scorched, but it was still readable. Still speaking.

An Urban Center During Attack

Two days prior, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, violent blasts. The internet was entirely disconnected. I was in my flat, working on a work about what it means to move language across cultures, and the principles and concerns of inhabiting another’s voice. As buildings fell, I sat revising a text that contended, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything ceased. A book my publishing house had been about to go to print was halted when the printing house ceased operations. Shops shut one by one. One night, when the blasts were too nearby, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the library in my apartment, filled with lexicons, valuable books I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Separation and Loss

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be safer towns – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a photo: in the distance, a factory was on fire, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and peril seemed to chase them.

During those days, feelings swept through the city like a storm: sudden fear, apprehension, indignation at the injustice, then apathy. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick queries and materials that translation demands.

Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every window was destroyed, the belongings lay ruined, objects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, painting at an easel, refusing to let silence and debris have the ultimate victory.

Translating Sorrow

A image circulated digitally of a 23-year-old poet who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her writing went spread rapidly alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an older woman running between alleys, yelling a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried remembrance. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: changing ruin into image, demise into lines, mourning into quest.

The Work as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by ruin, I found myself working on a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant 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 striving for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all longed for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond an art form: it was an act of perseverance, 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 philosopher in his confinement, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that translation become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, aspiration, rigor, foundation, and analogy” all at once.

A Marked Legacy

And then came the picture. I spotted it on a platform and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, marked but intact, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, devoid of life among the concrete and debris. For most of my career, I had been invisible, 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 complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, determined declination to be silenced.