Within those Devastated Remains of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Volume I’d Rendered
Within the wreckage of a destroyed structure, a single vision remained with me: a volume I had rendered from the English language to Persian, sitting partially covered in dirt and ash. Its front was torn and smudged, its pages curled and burned, but it was still legible. Still communicating.
A Metropolis During Attack
Two days earlier, rockets commenced attacking the city. There were no sirens, just abrupt, powerful explosions. The internet was totally severed. I was in my apartment, rendering a text about what it means to move words across languages, and the ethics and concerns of taking on someone else's voice. As structures collapsed, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of significance.
Everything halted. A book my publishing house had been about to go to print was halted when the facility ceased operations. Shops locked their doors one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop worrying about the bookshelves in my apartment, filled with lexicons, rare editions I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That library was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.
Dispersal and Grief
My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure locations – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a picture: in the distance, a plant was ablaze, black smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly somewhere else, and peril seemed to follow them.
During those days, moods swept through the city like a storm: instant dread, apprehension, moral outrage at the wrong, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and references that the work demands.
Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their casings; at a family member's house, every window was destroyed, the possessions lay broken, objects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an easel, refusing to let silence and debris have the ultimate victory.
Transforming Pain
A picture circulated digitally of a 23-year-old poet who was died when missiles struck a building. Her poem went spread rapidly alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an older woman hurrying between alleyways, shouting a name. People said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some repressed remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.
We were all translating, in our own way: changing devastation into image, death into verse, sorrow into quest.
Translation as Resistance
A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself rendering a story for young readers 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 lost his sight yet continued creating until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all desired – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth reaching toward.
During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than a skill: it was an act of defiance, of remaining, 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 cell, asking for more books, insisting that linguistic work become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, hope, discipline, anchor, and metaphor” all at once.
An Enduring Work
And then came the picture. I saw 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 shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been black and white, devoid of life among the debris and ruins. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but enduring.
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 attack, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, unyielding rejection to be silenced.