Among the Bombed-Out Debris of an Residential Building, I Saw a Volume I’d Rendered

Within the wreckage of a destroyed structure, a particular image stayed with me: a tome I had rendered from the English language to Farsi, resting half-buried in dust and soot. Its cover was ripped and stained, its pages bent and scorched, but it was still readable. Still uttering words.

A Metropolis Under Assault

Two days earlier, missiles commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just sudden, violent detonations. The web was entirely severed. I was in my apartment, rendering a work about what it means to carry language across tongues, and the morals and concerns of taking on a different perspective. As structures came down, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its subtle way, for the persistence of meaning.

Everything stopped. A book my publishing house had been about to send to press was stuck when the printing house ceased operations. Shops shut one by one. One night, when the explosions were too close, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, filled with reference books, hard-to-find books I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Dispersal and Loss

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure areas – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a photo: in the faraway, a factory was ablaze, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to chase them.

During those days, emotions passed over the city like weather: sudden fear, apprehension, moral outrage at the injustice, then detachment. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their casings; at a relative's house, every window was destroyed, the belongings lay broken, objects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, painting at an easel, declining to let silence and dirt have the ultimate victory.

Translating Sorrow

A image spread digitally of a young artist who was died when missiles struck a building. Her writing went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an aged woman hurrying between alleyways, calling a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some buried remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: changing destruction into art, loss into verse, grief into quest.

The Work as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst ruin, I found myself rendering a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet kept creating until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all yearned for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond a skill: it was an act of perseverance, of remaining, of enduring.

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

A Marked Work

And then came the photograph. I saw it on a platform and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, marked but whole, my name displayed 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 invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but surviving.

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 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 carry stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, stubborn declination to disappear.