Among the Ruined Debris of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Book I’d Translated
Within the rubble of a collapsed building, a particular sight remained with me: a book I had converted from English to Persian, sitting partially covered in dust and ash. Its front was torn and dirtied, its sheets bent and singed, but it was still legible. Still communicating.
An Urban Center Under Bombardment
Two days before, rockets started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, violent detonations. The web was completely disconnected. I was in my residence, rendering a text about what it means to carry words across languages, and the ethics and anxieties of taking on someone else's voice. As edifices collapsed, I sat polishing a text that contended, in its quiet way, for the endurance of meaning.
Everything halted. A book my publisher had been about to go to print was stranded when the printer closed. Retailers closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop thinking about the bookshelves in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, 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 endure the night.
Separation and Grief
My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous towns – 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 industrial site was ablaze, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to follow them.
During those days, feelings moved through the city like a storm: sudden dread, anxiety, righteous anger at the injustice, then apathy. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and materials that the craft demands.
Outside, blast waves tore windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every pane was broken, the possessions lay broken, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an easel, declining to let quiet and debris have the ultimate victory.
Translating Sorrow
A photograph circulated digitally of a young writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman hurrying between alleyways, shouting a name. People said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some deep-seated memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home.
We were all transforming, in our own way: transforming destruction into image, loss into lines, sorrow into quest.
The Craft as Persistence
A week after the attacks began, still amidst devastation, I found myself rendering a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet continued creating until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all desired – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth pursuing.
During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond a skill: it was an act of perseverance, of remaining, of enduring.
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 dictionaries, insisting that linguistic work become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, goal, discipline, foundation, and metaphor” all at once.
A Scarred Voice
And then came the picture. I saw it on a platform and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, scarred but surviving, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, drained 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 visible – scarred, but surviving.
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 bombardment, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a subtle, determined declination to disappear.
