Among the Ruined Remains of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Volume I’d Translated
Among the rubble of a fallen apartment block, a single vision remained with me: a volume I had converted from the English language to Persian, lying half-buried in dirt and soot. Its jacket was ripped and stained, its sheets bent and burned, but it was still legible. Still communicating.
An Urban Center Amid Assault
Two days earlier, rockets commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, forceful detonations. The internet was totally severed. I was in my residence, translating a work about what it means to move text across languages, and the morals and anxieties of taking on another’s perspective. As edifices fell, I sat revising a text that contended, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of significance.
Everything stopped. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to send to press was halted when the facility closed. Retailers locked their doors one by one. One night, when the booms were too nearby, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop thinking about the bookshelves in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, valuable volumes 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 endure the night.
Separation and Loss
My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous locations – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a picture: in the faraway, a plant was burning, dark smoke coiling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and peril seemed to pursue them.
During those days, moods swept through the city like a front: sudden terror, unease, indignation at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate searches and sources that translation demands.
Outside, concussive forces blew windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every pane was shattered, the possessions lay ruined, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, painting at an easel, refusing to let silence and dust have the last word.
Transforming Sorrow
A photograph circulated on social media of a 23-year-old artist who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an older woman hurrying between alleyways, yelling a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some buried remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.
We were all transforming, in our own way: changing ruin into image, loss into poetry, grief into longing.
Translation as Defiance
A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by ruin, I found myself rendering a fable about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted working until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all yearned for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth pursuing.
During those nights, I understood translation as something more than literary craft: it was an act of defiance, of staying put, of persisting.
One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his confinement, asking for more resources, insisting that language study become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, hope, discipline, anchor, and metaphor” all at once.
An Enduring Work
And then came the photograph. I saw it on a website and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, damaged but whole, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, drained of life among the debris and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but enduring.
I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else falls away. It is a subtle, determined declination to vanish.