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

In the wreckage of a fallen structure, a single vision stayed with me: a tome I had converted from English to Farsi, sitting half-buried in dirt and ash. Its jacket was torn and dirtied, its leaves bent and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking.

An Urban Center Under Bombardment

Two days earlier, missiles commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, forceful explosions. The web was totally severed. I was in my residence, translating a book about what it means to carry words across tongues, and the morals and concerns of taking on another’s voice. As buildings came down, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its subtle way, for the persistence of meaning.

Everything halted. A manuscript my publisher had been about to publish was halted when the facility shut down. Shops locked their doors one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop thinking about the library in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, rare editions I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That library was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Separation and Loss

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous towns – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a image: in the background, a industrial site was on fire, thick smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like a storm: sudden fear, apprehension, moral outrage at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the emotional toll, the attack destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate queries and materials that the work demands.

Outside, shockwaves ripped windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every pane was broken, the furniture lay broken, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, painting at an stand, declining to let quiet and debris have the ultimate victory.

Transforming Sorrow

A photograph spread digitally of a young writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went was widely shared with her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman running between passages, calling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some buried memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: changing destruction into art, demise into lines, sorrow into quest.

The Work as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself working on a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet kept creating until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all longed for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond literary craft: 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 confinement, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that translation become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, goal, discipline, support, and metaphor” all at once.

An Enduring Legacy

And then came the image. I noticed it on a platform and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, marked but surviving, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, devoid 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 gazed upon 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 bombardment, 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 endure when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, stubborn declination to be silenced.