Within those Devastated Remains of an Residential Building, I Saw a Volume I’d Rendered

Among the debris of a destroyed structure, a solitary image stayed with me: a book I had converted from the English language to Persian, sitting half-buried in dust and ash. Its jacket was ripped and dirtied, its leaves curled and scorched, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking.

A City Under Assault

Two days earlier, missiles started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, powerful blasts. The digital network was totally severed. I was in my residence, translating a text about what it means to transport text across cultures, and the principles and worries of occupying someone else's narrative. As structures fell, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything halted. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to go to print was stuck when the facility closed. Bookstores shut one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the library in my apartment, filled with reference books, valuable volumes I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That library was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Distance and Grief

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous areas – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a image: in the distance, a factory was ablaze, thick smoke spiraling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly far away, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like a storm: instant fear, anxiety, indignation at the injustice, then detachment. Beyond the emotional toll, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick queries and materials that translation demands.

Outside, concussive forces blew windows from their sashes; at a relative's house, every sheet of glass was destroyed, the belongings lay damaged, personal effects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, painting at an stand, choosing not to let quiet and dust have the ultimate victory.

Transforming Pain

A photograph spread on social media of a young poet who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an elderly woman running between alleyways, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried memory. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: turning destruction into art, loss into lines, grief into quest.

The Craft as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still amidst devastation, I found myself working on a children’s tale 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 lost his sight yet continued producing until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all longed for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than literary craft: it was an act of perseverance, of staying put, of holding on.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that language study become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, hope, rigor, anchor, and analogy” all at once.

An Enduring Work

And then came the photograph. I saw it on a platform and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, marked but surviving, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, devoid 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 visible – scarred, but persisting.

I looked 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 attack, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else falls away. It is a quiet, determined declination to be silenced.