Within the Ruined Remains of an Residential Building, I Saw a Volume I Had Rendered

Among the wreckage of a collapsed building, a solitary vision stayed with me: a tome I had translated from English to Farsi, sitting half-buried in dust and ash. Its cover was torn and smudged, its pages bent and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still uttering words.

An Urban Center Amid Assault

Two days earlier, missiles commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, powerful detonations. The digital network was completely disconnected. I was in my apartment, translating a text about what it means to move words across cultures, and the morals and worries of inhabiting a different perspective. As structures collapsed, I sat revising a text that contended, in its quiet way, for the persistence of significance.

Everything ceased. A manuscript my publisher had been about to send to press was halted when the printing house ceased operations. Bookstores closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, holding dictionaries, 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 survive the night.

Separation and Devastation

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous locations – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a image: in the distance, a factory was on fire, thick smoke spiraling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to pursue them.

During those days, feelings moved through the city like a storm: sudden terror, apprehension, righteous anger at the wrong, then detachment. Beyond the personal impact, the attack destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick searches and materials that translation demands.

Outside, blast waves blew windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every pane was shattered, the furniture lay broken, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, painting at an easel, refusing to let stillness and dirt have the last word.

Transforming Sorrow

A picture was shared online of a young writer who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her writing went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an elderly woman running between alleyways, yelling a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some repressed remembrance. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: changing ruin into image, death into lines, sorrow into search.

The Craft as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still amidst devastation, I found myself translating a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted working until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all longed for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond literary craft: it was an act of defiance, of holding one's ground, 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 cell, asking for more books, insisting that language study become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, aspiration, rigor, foundation, and symbol” all at once.

A Marked Voice

And then came the image. I saw it on a news site and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, marked but whole, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, stripped of life among the debris and debris. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – 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 true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else disappears. It is a persistent, stubborn declination to disappear.