Amid the Devastated Debris of an Residential Building, I Saw a Volume I’d Rendered
Among the debris of a destroyed building, a solitary image stayed with me: a volume I had translated from English to Persian, sitting partly concealed in dust and ash. Its jacket was torn and dirtied, its sheets curled and singed, but it was still readable. Still communicating.
A Metropolis During Assault
Two days prior, projectiles started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, forceful detonations. The internet was completely severed. I was in my flat, translating a book about what it means to transport language across cultures, and the principles and worries of occupying someone else's narrative. As buildings came down, I sat polishing a text that argued, in its quiet way, for the endurance of purpose.
Everything stopped. A book my publisher had been about to go to print was stranded when the printing house shut down. Retailers locked their doors one by one. One night, when the booms were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop thinking about the library in my apartment, filled with reference books, valuable books I had spent years accumulating 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 partner left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure towns – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a factory was burning, dark smoke spiraling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and danger seemed to follow them.
During those days, feelings passed over the city like a front: instant terror, unease, indignation at the injustice, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and materials that the craft demands.
Outside, blast waves ripped windows from their frames; at a relative's house, every pane was broken, the belongings lay damaged, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, painting at an easel, declining to let silence and dirt have the ultimate victory.
Converting Grief
A picture spread digitally of a 23-year-old writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an older woman dashing between alleyways, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some repressed memory. She was searching for a child who would never come home.
We were all converting, in our own way: changing devastation into image, loss into lines, mourning into longing.
The Craft as Resistance
A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of destruction, I found myself translating a children’s tale 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 lost his sight yet continued producing until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all yearned for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth striving for.
During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than a skill: it was an act of resistance, of holding one's ground, of enduring.
One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his cell, asking for more resources, insisting that language study become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, goal, rigor, foundation, and analogy” all at once.
An Enduring Voice
And then came the picture. I spotted it on a platform and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, scarred but surviving, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, drained of life among the concrete and debris. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, 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 political act”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, determined refusal to disappear.
