Among the Devastated Remains of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Book I Had Rendered
Within the debris of a fallen structure, a solitary image stayed with me: a volume I had rendered from the English language to Farsi, resting half-buried in dirt and ash. Its jacket was ripped and dirtied, its sheets curled and scorched, but it was still readable. Still uttering words.
A City During Bombardment
Two days before, missiles commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, violent detonations. The web was entirely disconnected. I was in my residence, rendering a work about what it means to move words across tongues, and the ethics and anxieties of taking on a different perspective. As edifices fell, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of meaning.
Everything halted. A project my publishing house had been about to go to print was stuck when the printer 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 shelter. I couldn’t stop thinking about the shelves in my apartment, filled with lexicons, valuable books I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That library was my life'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 less dangerous areas – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a plant was burning, thick smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to chase them.
During those days, moods swept through the city like a front: instant dread, unease, indignation at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the emotional toll, the shelling dismantled 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 tore windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every window was broken, the belongings lay ruined, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, painting at an easel, choosing not to let quiet and dust have the last word.
Translating Sorrow
A photograph spread online of a young artist who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her writing went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman hurrying between alleys, yelling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some deep-seated memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home.
We were all transforming, in our own way: changing devastation into picture, demise into lines, mourning into quest.
The Work as Persistence
A week after the attacks began, still amidst ruin, 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 significant meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted creating until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unreachable. 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 greater than a skill: it was an act of defiance, of remaining, of enduring.
One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his confinement, asking for more resources, insisting that linguistic work become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, aspiration, rigor, support, and analogy” all at once.
An Enduring Work
And then came the photograph. I noticed it on a news site and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, marked but whole, my name printed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, stripped of life among the debris and ruins. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but surviving.
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 true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else falls away. It is a persistent, unyielding declination to disappear.