Within the Bombed-Out Remains of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Volume I’d Rendered

Among the wreckage of a collapsed structure, a solitary vision remained with me: a volume I had rendered from English to Farsi, lying partly concealed in dust and ash. Its front was shredded and smudged, its pages bent and scorched, but it was still legible. Still speaking.

A Metropolis During Assault

Two days earlier, missiles started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, violent blasts. The web was entirely disconnected. I was in my apartment, translating a work about what it means to transport language across cultures, and the ethics and worries of inhabiting another’s voice. As structures collapsed, I sat editing a text that suggested, in its quiet way, for the endurance of purpose.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publisher had been about to send to press was stranded when the printer closed. Bookstores locked their doors one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop worrying about the bookshelves in my apartment, holding dictionaries, hard-to-find volumes 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.

Dispersal and Loss

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous towns – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a image: in the background, a plant was burning, dark smoke curling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and peril seemed to follow them.

During those days, feelings swept through the city like a storm: swift dread, unease, indignation at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the bombardment eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and references that translation demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their casings; at a relative's house, every pane was shattered, the belongings lay broken, objects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, creating at an easel, declining to let silence and debris have the ultimate victory.

Converting Sorrow

A picture circulated on social media of a young writer who was died when missiles struck a building. Her poem went was widely shared next to her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an older woman running between alleyways, calling a name. People said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried recollection. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: turning destruction into picture, demise into verse, grief into quest.

Translation as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still amidst destruction, I found myself rendering a fable 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 persisted producing until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all desired – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth pursuing.

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

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his prison cell, asking for more resources, insisting that linguistic work become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, goal, rigor, foundation, and metaphor” 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 works, damaged but intact, my name printed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, devoid of life among the debris and ruins. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but surviving.

I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the full weight of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, determined declination to disappear.