Among those Devastated Debris of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Book I’d Rendered
Within the rubble of a destroyed structure, a single sight lingered with me: a book I had rendered from the English language to Farsi, lying partially covered in dirt and ash. Its cover was ripped and dirtied, its sheets curled and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still uttering words.
A City Amid Attack
Two days before, projectiles started hitting the city. There were no sirens, just abrupt, powerful detonations. The digital network was entirely disconnected. I was in my residence, translating a text about what it means to move language across tongues, and the principles and concerns of taking on someone else's perspective. As buildings fell, I sat editing a text that contended, in its subtle way, for the endurance of significance.
Everything halted. A book my publisher had been about to go to print was stuck when the printing house ceased operations. Shops shut one by one. One night, when the booms were too imminent, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the bookshelves in my apartment, holding lexicons, rare books I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That library was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.
Separation and Devastation
My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure towns – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a photo: in the distance, a factory was ablaze, thick smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to pursue them.
During those days, moods moved through the city like weather: swift fear, unease, righteous anger at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and references that the craft demands.
Outside, blast waves blew windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every window was shattered, the possessions lay ruined, household items scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an easel, declining to let quiet and dirt have the ultimate victory.
Converting Grief
A photograph spread digitally of a young poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an elderly woman dashing between alleys, yelling a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some deep-seated recollection. She was seeking a child who would never come home.
We were all translating, in our own way: changing destruction into art, loss into verse, mourning into quest.
The Craft as Persistence
A week after the attacks began, still amidst devastation, I found myself translating a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet kept creating until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all longed for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth pursuing.
During those nights, I understood translation as something more than a skill: it was an act of perseverance, of staying put, of enduring.
One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his prison cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that translation become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, aspiration, discipline, foundation, and metaphor” all at once.
A Marked Work
And then came the picture. I spotted it on a website and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, scarred but intact, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, drained of life among the concrete and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but enduring.
I looked at 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 attack, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else falls away. It is a persistent, determined declination to disappear.
