Amid the Devastated Remains of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Volume I’d Translated

Within the wreckage of a fallen structure, a solitary sight remained with me: a volume I had converted from the English language to Farsi, resting partly concealed in dust and ash. Its cover was ripped and stained, its sheets curled and burned, but it was still readable. Still speaking.

A Metropolis During Assault

Two days earlier, rockets commenced attacking the city. There were no sirens, just unexpected, violent blasts. The digital network was entirely disconnected. I was in my flat, translating a text about what it means to move words across cultures, and the morals and concerns of occupying a different voice. As structures fell, I sat revising a text that argued, in its quiet way, for the persistence of significance.

Everything halted. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to publish was stuck when the printer shut down. Retailers shut one by one. One night, when the explosions were too nearby, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop thinking about the library in my apartment, filled with dictionaries, rare editions I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Distance and Grief

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be safer locations – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a photo: in the background, a plant was ablaze, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions passed over the city like a storm: instant terror, unease, indignation at the wrong, then detachment. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate searches and references that translation demands.

Outside, concussive forces ripped windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the belongings lay broken, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, creating at an easel, declining to let quiet and dust have the ultimate victory.

Translating Grief

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

We were all converting, in our own way: transforming ruin into image, death into lines, sorrow into longing.

The Craft as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself working on a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will recover 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 producing until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all yearned for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than literary craft: it was an act of resistance, of staying put, of holding on.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his cell, asking for more books, insisting that language study become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, goal, rigor, support, and metaphor” all at once.

A Marked Voice

And then came the photograph. I noticed it on a platform and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, scarred but intact, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, 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 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 complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, determined declination to be silenced.