Among the Ruined Remains of an Apartment Block, I Found a Book I Had Rendered
Within the wreckage of a fallen apartment block, a solitary image lingered with me: a tome I had rendered from English to Farsi, lying partly concealed in dust and soot. Its front was ripped and stained, its pages bent and burned, but it was still legible. Still communicating.
An Urban Center Amid Assault
Two days earlier, missiles commenced attacking the city. There were no sirens, just sudden, powerful explosions. The web was entirely disconnected. I was in my flat, translating a book about what it means to transport words across tongues, and the ethics and concerns of inhabiting a different perspective. As structures fell, I sat polishing a text that argued, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of significance.
Everything halted. A book my publishing house had been about to go to print was stranded when the printer shut down. Shops closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too nearby, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the library in my apartment, holding lexicons, hard-to-find books I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.
Distance and Loss
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 image: in the distance, a plant was burning, black smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to chase them.
During those days, moods moved through the city like a front: swift dread, unease, moral outrage at the unfairness, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick queries and materials that the work demands.
Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their sashes; at a relative's house, every pane was destroyed, the furniture lay broken, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an stand, declining to let quiet and debris have the last word.
Translating Pain
A image circulated on social media of a young poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared with her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an elderly woman running between alleys, calling a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some buried recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home.
We were all translating, in our own way: changing devastation into art, loss into lines, grief into longing.
The Craft as Resistance
A week after the attacks began, still amidst devastation, I found myself working on a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who lost 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 tranquility we all desired – 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 enduring.
One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that linguistic work become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, aspiration, practice, support, and metaphor” all at once.
A Marked Work
And then came the photograph. I saw it on a news site and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, scarred but surviving, my name printed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been black and white, stripped of life among the debris and debris. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, 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 political act”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under attack, 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 disappears. It is a persistent, unyielding rejection to vanish.