Among the Ruined Remains of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Volume I’d Rendered

Within the rubble of a fallen structure, a solitary vision stayed with me: a tome I had rendered from the English language to Farsi, lying half-buried in dust and soot. Its front was shredded and smudged, its sheets curled and scorched, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking.

An Urban Center Amid Assault

Two days before, projectiles started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, violent explosions. The internet was totally cut off. I was in my apartment, rendering a book about what it means to carry text across languages, and the ethics and worries of occupying someone else's voice. As buildings came down, I sat revising a text that argued, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything ceased. A book my publishing house had been about to send to press was stuck when the facility ceased operations. Retailers closed one by one. One night, when the booms were too nearby, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop thinking about the bookshelves in my apartment, filled with lexicons, rare books I had spent years gathering 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 endure the night.

Separation and Devastation

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be safer areas – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a industrial site was burning, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to follow them.

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

Outside, concussive forces blew windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every pane was destroyed, the belongings lay broken, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an stand, declining to let stillness and dirt have the ultimate victory.

Transforming Sorrow

A image was shared on social media of a 23-year-old artist who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her verse went viral alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an elderly woman running between passages, shouting a name. People said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some buried remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: changing devastation into picture, demise into lines, mourning into longing.

Translation as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of ruin, I found myself working on a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet continued working until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth striving for.

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

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his confinement, asking for more resources, insisting that translation become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, goal, rigor, anchor, and analogy” 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 translations, marked but surviving, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, drained of life among the concrete and debris. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – 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 fire, 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 falls away. It is a persistent, unyielding declination to disappear.