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

Within the wreckage of a fallen structure, a particular vision remained with me: a book I had rendered from the English language to Persian, lying half-buried in dirt and soot. Its jacket was shredded and smudged, its leaves bent and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking.

A Metropolis Under Attack

Two days before, projectiles started hitting the city. There were no sirens, just sudden, violent explosions. The web was entirely severed. I was in my flat, translating a text about what it means to transport language across cultures, and the principles and anxieties of taking on someone else's voice. As edifices fell, I sat revising a text that contended, in its quiet way, for the persistence of meaning.

Everything stopped. A project my publisher had been about to send to press was stuck when the printing house shut down. Shops closed one by one. One night, when the explosions were too nearby, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop thinking about the library in my apartment, holding dictionaries, valuable volumes I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Dispersal and Loss

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be safer areas – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the background, a industrial site was ablaze, dark smoke spiraling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly somewhere else, and danger seemed to follow them.

During those days, feelings moved through the city like a storm: sudden dread, unease, righteous anger at the wrong, then numbness. Beyond the emotional toll, the attack eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and sources that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces ripped windows from their sashes; at a family member's house, every window was destroyed, the furniture lay damaged, objects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, painting at an easel, refusing to let quiet and dust have the final say.

Transforming Pain

A picture circulated online of a 23-year-old poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her poem went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an elderly woman running between alleys, calling a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some repressed remembrance. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: turning ruin into art, loss into verse, sorrow into longing.

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst 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 deep meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet kept producing until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the impossible. 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 greater than literary craft: it was an act of perseverance, of staying put, of persisting.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his cell, asking for more books, insisting that language study become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, aspiration, practice, anchor, and analogy” all at once.

A Marked Voice

And then came the picture. I saw it on a platform and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, scarred but whole, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, 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 seen – scarred, but enduring.

I stared at 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 obliterated. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, stubborn rejection to vanish.