Amid those Devastated Remains of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Volume I’d Translated

Among the wreckage of a destroyed apartment block, a particular vision remained with me: a volume I had rendered from the English language to Farsi, sitting half-buried in dust and ash. Its jacket was shredded and dirtied, its sheets curled and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking.

An Urban Center During Assault

Two days prior, missiles began striking the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, powerful blasts. The web was completely cut off. I was in my residence, translating a work about what it means to carry text across languages, and the principles and anxieties of taking on another’s voice. As edifices came down, I sat polishing a text that argued, in its subtle way, for the persistence of meaning.

Everything ceased. A manuscript my publisher had been about to publish was halted when the facility shut down. Bookstores shut one by one. One night, when the booms were too close, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the library in my apartment, holding dictionaries, valuable editions I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Dispersal and Loss

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous locations – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a picture: in the distance, a industrial site was burning, dark smoke spiraling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to pursue them.

During those days, moods passed over the city like weather: sudden terror, apprehension, indignation at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the personal impact, the attack eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick look-ups and sources that translation demands.

Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every pane was destroyed, the possessions lay damaged, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, working at an stand, choosing not to let quiet and debris have the last word.

Converting Pain

A photograph spread digitally of a young artist 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 older woman hurrying between passages, yelling a name. People said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some buried memory. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: turning devastation into image, demise into verse, mourning into quest.

The Work as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of destruction, I found myself translating a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep 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 unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all desired – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than literary craft: it was an act of resistance, of holding one's ground, of holding on.

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 translation become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, aspiration, practice, support, and metaphor” all at once.

A Scarred Legacy

And then came the picture. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, marked but whole, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, 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 visible – scarred, but surviving.

I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a act with consequences”, but I had never felt the full weight of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else falls away. It is a subtle, stubborn declination to disappear.