Among the Devastated Debris of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Volume I Had Rendered

Within the wreckage of a fallen building, a solitary vision stayed with me: a tome I had converted from the English language to Farsi, lying partially covered in dirt and soot. Its cover was torn and stained, its sheets curled and scorched, but it was still decipherable. Still uttering words.

An Urban Center Amid Attack

Two days prior, rockets commenced attacking the city. There were no sirens, just sudden, forceful detonations. The digital network was totally cut off. I was in my apartment, translating a work about what it means to transport words across languages, and the principles and concerns of inhabiting someone else's perspective. As structures collapsed, I sat polishing a text that argued, in its understated way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything ceased. A manuscript my publisher had been about to publish was stuck when the printer shut down. Bookstores shut one by one. One night, when the booms were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop thinking about the library in my apartment, holding reference books, rare volumes 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 make it through the night.

Separation and Devastation

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be safer areas – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the distance, a plant was burning, black smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and danger seemed to pursue them.

During those days, emotions passed over the city like a front: sudden fear, anxiety, righteous anger at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the emotional toll, the attack eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate queries and sources that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces blew windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every window was broken, the belongings lay damaged, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, painting at an stand, refusing to let stillness and dirt have the last word.

Converting Sorrow

A picture spread digitally of a young artist who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared next to her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an elderly woman dashing between alleys, calling a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some buried recollection. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: transforming devastation into image, demise into verse, sorrow into search.

The Work as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself rendering a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet continued creating until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all yearned for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond literary craft: it was an act of resistance, of remaining, 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 cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that language study become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, hope, practice, anchor, and metaphor” all at once.

An Enduring Work

And then came the image. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, scarred but whole, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, drained of life among the concrete and ruins. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but persisting.

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 complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, determined refusal to be silenced.