Within the Ruined Debris of an Residential Building, I Saw a Volume I’d Rendered

In the rubble of a collapsed structure, a single sight stayed with me: a tome I had converted from the English language to Farsi, resting partially covered in dust and ash. Its jacket was shredded and dirtied, its sheets curled and scorched, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking.

A Metropolis Under Bombardment

Two days before, missiles commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, powerful detonations. The digital network was totally cut off. I was in my flat, working on a book about what it means to move language across cultures, and the principles and worries of inhabiting someone else's perspective. As structures fell, I sat revising a text that suggested, in its subtle way, for the endurance of purpose.

Everything ceased. A project my publisher had been about to send to press was stuck when the printer shut down. Shops locked their doors one by one. One night, when the booms were too close, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop thinking about the shelves in my apartment, stocked with reference books, hard-to-find books I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That library was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Distance and Loss

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure locations – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a factory was burning, dark smoke curling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to chase them.

During those days, moods moved through the city like weather: sudden dread, apprehension, moral outrage at the wrong, then numbness. Beyond the psychological cost, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick look-ups and references that translation demands.

Outside, shockwaves ripped windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every pane was shattered, the furniture lay broken, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an stand, refusing to let silence and dirt have the final say.

Transforming Grief

A image spread online of a young poet who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her verse went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an aged woman running between passages, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some repressed recollection. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: turning destruction into picture, demise into verse, sorrow into longing.

The Craft as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still amidst destruction, I found myself working on a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet continued working until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all longed for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than an art form: it was an act of perseverance, of remaining, of holding on.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that linguistic work become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, hope, practice, support, and analogy” all at once.

An Enduring Work

And then came the picture. I noticed it on a platform and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, marked but intact, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, stripped of life among the debris and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been unseen, 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 fire, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else disappears. It is a persistent, unyielding declination to be silenced.