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

Among the wreckage of a collapsed building, a particular sight remained with me: a volume I had translated from English to Persian, sitting half-buried in dust and soot. Its front was torn and smudged, its pages bent and burned, but it was still legible. Still uttering words.

A City Amid Bombardment

Two days before, rockets commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just sudden, forceful detonations. The internet was totally severed. I was in my apartment, working on a work about what it means to move text across languages, and the principles and anxieties of inhabiting someone else's perspective. As structures collapsed, I sat editing a text that contended, in its subtle way, for the endurance of meaning.

Everything stopped. A book my publisher had been about to go to print was halted when the printer ceased operations. Bookstores shut one by one. One night, when the explosions were too nearby, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the library in my apartment, filled with reference books, valuable volumes I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Separation and Devastation

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be safer areas – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a photo: in the background, a plant was ablaze, thick smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and peril seemed to chase them.

During those days, emotions moved through the city like a storm: sudden terror, anxiety, moral outrage at the wrong, then numbness. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant look-ups and sources that the work demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every window was shattered, the possessions lay ruined, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, painting at an stand, declining to let stillness and debris have the final say.

Converting Grief

A picture circulated online of a young writer who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared next to her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an elderly woman hurrying between alleyways, calling a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some buried memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: changing destruction into picture, loss into verse, sorrow into search.

The Craft as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of ruin, 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 profound 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 striving for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all longed for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than an art form: it was an act of resistance, of staying put, of enduring.

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

A Marked Work

And then came the image. I spotted it on a website and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, scarred but intact, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, devoid of life among the debris and ruins. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but enduring.

I stared at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a act with consequences”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice had significance”. 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, unyielding rejection to vanish.