Within those Ruined Remains of an Residential Building, I Saw a Volume I’d Translated

Among the rubble of a collapsed building, a solitary vision remained with me: a book I had rendered from English to Farsi, lying half-buried in dust and ash. Its jacket was torn and stained, its sheets bent and scorched, but it was still legible. Still communicating.

A City Under Attack

Two days before, missiles began striking the city. There were no alarms, just sudden, violent blasts. The internet was entirely disconnected. I was in my apartment, working on a work about what it means to transport text across tongues, and the morals and concerns of taking on a different narrative. As edifices came down, I sat editing a text that suggested, in its quiet way, for the persistence of significance.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publisher had been about to send to press was stranded when the printing house ceased operations. Bookstores locked their doors one by one. One night, when the booms were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the library in my apartment, filled with dictionaries, valuable editions I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That library was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Dispersal and Grief

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be safer locations – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a photo: in the background, a industrial site was burning, thick smoke coiling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly far away, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods moved through the city like a storm: instant dread, anxiety, moral outrage at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate searches and materials that the work demands.

Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the furniture lay broken, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an stand, declining to let quiet and dirt have the final say.

Transforming Grief

A picture spread digitally of a 23-year-old poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an aged woman running between alleys, shouting a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some repressed memory. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: changing destruction into image, loss into poetry, sorrow into search.

The Craft as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of ruin, I found myself rendering a story for young readers 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 experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted working until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all yearned for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth pursuing.

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

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 “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, goal, practice, support, and symbol” all at once.

An Enduring Legacy

And then came the image. I noticed it on a platform and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, damaged but whole, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, stripped 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 surviving.

I stared 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 bombardment, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else falls away. It is a subtle, unyielding refusal to be silenced.