Within the Bombed-Out Debris of an Residential Building, I Saw a Volume I Had Rendered

Within the debris of a collapsed building, a particular vision stayed with me: a tome I had translated from the English language to Farsi, lying partially covered in dirt and ash. Its front was torn and smudged, its sheets curled and burned, but it was still legible. Still uttering words.

A Metropolis Amid Attack

Two days earlier, rockets started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, violent explosions. The digital network was totally severed. I was in my apartment, rendering a book about what it means to transport text across cultures, and the principles and anxieties of taking on another’s narrative. As buildings came down, I sat polishing a text that contended, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of significance.

Everything halted. A book my publisher had been about to go to print was halted when the printer ceased operations. Bookstores closed one by one. One night, when the explosions were too imminent, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop thinking about the shelves in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, hard-to-find volumes I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Dispersal 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 pulling out, she sent me a image: in the distance, a industrial site was ablaze, black smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like weather: swift terror, apprehension, moral outrage at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick queries and sources that the craft demands.

Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their casings; at a relative's house, every pane was destroyed, the belongings lay broken, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, painting at an easel, refusing to let silence and dust have the last word.

Transforming Grief

A picture was shared digitally of a young writer who was died when missiles struck a building. Her poem went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman dashing between alleys, shouting a name. People said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some repressed memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: changing ruin into image, loss into poetry, grief into longing.

The Craft as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst devastation, I found myself working on a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet persisted creating 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 impossible, yet still worth pursuing.

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

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his prison cell, asking for more resources, insisting that translation become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, hope, practice, foundation, and metaphor” all at once.

An Enduring Voice

And then came the image. I spotted it on a platform and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, damaged but surviving, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been devoid of color, drained of life among the concrete and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but enduring.

I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a political act”, 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 transport stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else disappears. It is a persistent, stubborn declination to disappear.