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

Among the debris of a fallen structure, a solitary image stayed with me: a book I had translated from English to Farsi, sitting partially covered in dust and soot. Its cover was torn and stained, its leaves bent and scorched, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating.

A City Under Bombardment

Two days prior, rockets began striking the city. There were no warnings, just sudden, violent detonations. The internet was totally severed. I was in my residence, rendering a text about what it means to carry words across tongues, and the ethics and worries of inhabiting a different narrative. As structures fell, I sat revising a text that suggested, in its subtle way, for the persistence of meaning.

Everything ceased. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to send to press was stuck when the printing house closed. Retailers locked their doors one by one. One night, when the booms were too nearby, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the bookshelves in my apartment, stocked with lexicons, valuable books I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Distance and Loss

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure towns – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a photo: in the faraway, a plant was on fire, black smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to chase them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like a storm: instant terror, apprehension, indignation at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the emotional toll, the attack eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and materials that translation demands.

Outside, blast waves blew windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every sheet of glass was destroyed, the possessions lay ruined, objects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, painting at an stand, choosing not to let silence and dust have the ultimate victory.

Converting Sorrow

A image was shared digitally of a young writer who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her verse went viral alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an aged woman running between alleyways, yelling a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: changing devastation into image, demise into poetry, grief into longing.

The Work as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst ruin, I found myself rendering a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet kept working until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all longed for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth striving for.

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

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

An Enduring Work

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

I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else falls away. It is a subtle, stubborn declination to vanish.