Within those Ruined Debris of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Book I’d Translated
Within the debris of a collapsed building, a particular vision stayed with me: a tome I had converted from the English language to Persian, sitting partially covered in dust and soot. Its jacket was shredded and stained, its pages curled and burned, but it was still readable. Still speaking.
An Urban Center Amid Attack
Two days prior, missiles commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, forceful blasts. The internet was totally severed. I was in my apartment, working on a work about what it means to carry text across tongues, and the principles and anxieties of occupying a different voice. As structures collapsed, I sat revising a text that argued, in its subtle way, for the persistence of meaning.
Everything halted. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to publish was stranded when the printer ceased operations. Bookstores closed one by one. One night, when the explosions were too nearby, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, filled with lexicons, hard-to-find volumes 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 survive the night.
Separation and Loss
My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be safer locations – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a picture: in the background, a industrial site was on fire, thick smoke curling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and danger seemed to chase them.
During those days, feelings swept through the city like a storm: instant terror, unease, righteous anger at the wrong, then detachment. Beyond the personal impact, the attack destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and references that the craft demands.
Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every pane was destroyed, the belongings lay broken, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, creating at an easel, declining to let stillness and debris have the last word.
Transforming Grief
A picture spread on social media of a 23-year-old poet who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly next to her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman dashing between alleyways, calling a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some repressed recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home.
We were all transforming, in our own way: turning destruction into picture, loss into verse, sorrow into quest.
Translation as Defiance
A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself rendering a fable about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet kept creating until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all longed for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth reaching toward.
During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond literary craft: it was an act of resistance, of holding one's ground, of persisting.
One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his confinement, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that translation become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, hope, discipline, support, and metaphor” all at once.
A Scarred Voice
And then came the photograph. I noticed it on a website and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, damaged but whole, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, drained of life among the debris and debris. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but enduring.
I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a act with consequences”, but I had never felt the full weight of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, unyielding rejection to be silenced.