Among those Devastated Remains of an Apartment Block, I Found a Volume I Had Rendered

Among the wreckage of a collapsed building, a particular vision remained with me: a tome I had converted from English to Farsi, lying half-buried in dust and ash. Its front was ripped and smudged, its pages curled and singed, but it was still readable. Still uttering words.

An Urban Center Under Assault

Two days earlier, missiles started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just sudden, violent detonations. The web was completely severed. I was in my apartment, working on a text about what it means to carry words across tongues, and the ethics and anxieties of taking on another’s perspective. As structures fell, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the persistence of significance.

Everything ceased. A book my publishing house had been about to go to print was stranded when the printing house shut down. 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 bookshelves in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, rare editions I had spent years accumulating 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 survive the night.

Distance and Grief

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be safer locations – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a photo: in the distance, a industrial site was burning, dark smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly far away, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like weather: swift dread, apprehension, moral outrage at the injustice, then apathy. Beyond the emotional toll, the attack eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant look-ups and references that translation demands.

Outside, blast waves ripped windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was destroyed, the belongings lay damaged, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an stand, refusing to let stillness and dust have the ultimate victory.

Converting Sorrow

A photograph was shared digitally of a 23-year-old writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went was widely shared next to her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman hurrying between alleys, yelling a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a conflict 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: turning destruction into image, loss into lines, sorrow into quest.

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 recover 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 reaching for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all desired – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond a skill: it was an act of perseverance, of remaining, 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 dictionaries, insisting that language study become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, hope, practice, foundation, and symbol” all at once.

An Enduring Voice

And then came the picture. I saw it on a website and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, scarred but intact, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, stripped of life among the debris and debris. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but persisting.

I stared at 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 fire, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, stubborn declination to be silenced.