Within those Devastated Remains of an Apartment Block, I Found a Volume I’d Rendered
In the wreckage of a collapsed building, a single sight lingered with me: a tome I had converted from English to Farsi, lying partly concealed in dirt and soot. Its cover was shredded and smudged, its sheets bent and scorched, but it was still legible. Still uttering words.
A City Amid Bombardment
Two days prior, missiles began striking the city. There were no sirens, just sudden, violent explosions. The internet was totally cut off. I was in my apartment, rendering a text about what it means to carry text across cultures, and the morals and concerns of occupying someone else's narrative. As structures came down, I sat polishing a text that contended, in its subtle way, for the endurance of purpose.
Everything halted. 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 blasts were too nearby, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the library in my apartment, filled with dictionaries, rare volumes I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.
Separation and Loss
My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure towns – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a picture: in the faraway, a factory was on fire, dark smoke curling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to pursue them.
During those days, moods moved through the city like a front: swift dread, anxiety, moral outrage at the injustice, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick look-ups and references that the work demands.
Outside, concussive forces ripped windows from their sashes; at a relative's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the furniture lay ruined, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an easel, declining to let quiet and dirt have the last word.
Transforming Pain
A photograph spread digitally of a young artist who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her poem went viral with her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman hurrying between alleys, calling a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some buried remembrance. She was looking for a child who would never come home.
We were all translating, in our own way: changing destruction into image, demise into lines, mourning into longing.
The Work as Resistance
A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself working on a fable about a king whose daughter will heal 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 continued working until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all longed for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth pursuing.
During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than literary craft: it was an act of defiance, of holding one's ground, of holding on.
One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his prison cell, asking for more books, insisting that language study become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, goal, discipline, support, and analogy” all at once.
An Enduring Work
And then came the image. I noticed it on a website and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, scarred but whole, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, devoid of life among the rubble and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but persisting.
I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a political act”, 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 erased. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else falls away. It is a subtle, stubborn declination to disappear.