Among the Devastated Remains of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Book I’d Rendered
In the wreckage of a collapsed structure, a solitary vision lingered with me: a tome I had rendered from English to Persian, resting half-buried in dust and ash. Its jacket was torn and dirtied, its sheets bent and singed, but it was still legible. Still communicating.
An Urban Center During Assault
Two days earlier, projectiles began striking the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, forceful blasts. The web was totally severed. I was in my flat, working on a text about what it means to move text across cultures, and the ethics and anxieties of occupying another’s narrative. As buildings collapsed, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of meaning.
Everything ceased. A manuscript my publisher had been about to publish was stranded when the printer closed. Bookstores closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too nearby, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the library in my apartment, filled with reference books, hard-to-find books I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.
Distance and Devastation
My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure towns – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a photo: in the background, a factory was on fire, thick smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly somewhere else, and peril seemed to pursue them.
During those days, emotions passed over the city like weather: instant fear, unease, moral outrage at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and references that the work demands.
Outside, blast waves tore windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every window was broken, the furniture lay broken, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, painting at an stand, choosing not to let stillness and dust have the last word.
Transforming Grief
A picture spread digitally of a 23-year-old writer who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an elderly woman running between alleyways, shouting a name. People said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some buried recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home.
We were all transforming, in our own way: turning destruction into picture, death into poetry, mourning into longing.
Translation as Resistance
A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself working on a fable about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet continued working until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the impossible. 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 greater than an art form: it was an act of perseverance, of staying put, of persisting.
One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his confinement, asking for more books, insisting that translation become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, hope, rigor, support, and symbol” all at once.
A Scarred Work
And then came the image. I saw it on a website and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, scarred but whole, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, drained of life among the rubble and ruins. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – 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 true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else falls away. It is a quiet, stubborn declination to vanish.
