Among those Devastated Debris of an Residential Building, I Saw a Volume I Had Rendered

Within the wreckage of a collapsed building, a solitary image remained with me: a tome I had converted from the English language to Farsi, resting partly concealed in dirt and soot. Its cover was shredded and stained, its pages bent and scorched, but it was still readable. Still uttering words.

A Metropolis During Attack

Two days earlier, rockets started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, forceful blasts. The web was totally cut off. I was in my residence, translating a book about what it means to move words across tongues, and the principles and worries of taking on someone else's perspective. As structures fell, I sat polishing a text that contended, in its understated way, for the persistence of significance.

Everything ceased. A book my publishing house had been about to go to print was stuck when the facility ceased operations. Bookstores locked their doors one by one. One night, when the booms were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop thinking about the bookshelves in my apartment, stocked with reference books, 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 make it through the night.

Separation and Loss

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be safer locations – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a picture: in the faraway, a plant was burning, thick smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to pursue them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like weather: instant terror, apprehension, moral outrage at the wrong, then numbness. Beyond the emotional toll, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and materials that the work demands.

Outside, shockwaves ripped windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the furniture lay broken, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, painting at an easel, declining to let stillness and debris have the final say.

Converting Sorrow

A photograph spread digitally of a 23-year-old writer who was died when missiles struck a building. Her poem went viral with her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an older woman hurrying between alleyways, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some buried recollection. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: changing destruction into art, loss into poetry, mourning into search.

The Work as Defiance

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

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

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his confinement, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that translation become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, aspiration, discipline, foundation, and symbol” all at once.

A Marked Work

And then came the picture. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, scarred but surviving, my name printed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been devoid of color, devoid of life among the concrete and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but surviving.

I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the full weight of this until then. To translate, even under attack, 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 endure when everything else disappears. It is a subtle, unyielding declination to vanish.