Among those Ruined Debris of an Residential Building, I Saw a Volume I’d Rendered

Within the debris of a destroyed structure, a solitary image lingered with me: a volume I had rendered from English to Farsi, resting partly concealed in dust and ash. Its jacket was shredded and smudged, its leaves bent and scorched, but it was still legible. Still speaking.

A City During Bombardment

Two days before, projectiles began striking the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, violent blasts. The internet was totally cut off. I was in my residence, rendering a book about what it means to carry language across cultures, and the ethics and concerns of occupying a different voice. As structures came down, I sat revising a text that suggested, in its quiet way, for the persistence of significance.

Everything halted. A project my publisher had been about to go to print was stranded when the facility closed. Shops locked their doors one by one. One night, when the explosions were too close, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop thinking about the bookshelves in my apartment, holding dictionaries, hard-to-find editions I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Distance and Grief

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure locations – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a industrial site was on fire, dark smoke spiraling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods moved through the city like a front: swift dread, anxiety, indignation at the wrong, then numbness. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick searches and sources that the work demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their casings; at a relative's house, every window was destroyed, the possessions lay broken, personal effects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an easel, refusing to let silence and debris have the final say.

Transforming Grief

A image was shared digitally of a 23-year-old writer who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman hurrying 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 deep-seated recollection. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: transforming ruin into image, demise into verse, grief into search.

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of ruin, I found myself working on a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet continued working until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all longed for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than literary craft: it was an act of resistance, of holding one's ground, of enduring.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his cell, asking for more books, insisting that language study become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, aspiration, discipline, support, and analogy” all at once.

A Scarred Work

And then came the photograph. I spotted it on a website and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, damaged but whole, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, drained of life among the rubble and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but enduring.

I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a act with consequences”, but I had never felt the complete significance 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 haul stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, stubborn declination to vanish.