Among the Devastated Remains of an Residential Building, I Saw a Volume I’d Rendered

Within the debris of a destroyed structure, a single image remained with me: a volume I had translated from the English language to Farsi, resting partially covered in dirt and soot. Its cover was torn and smudged, its pages curled and singed, but it was still readable. Still uttering words.

An Urban Center Under Bombardment

Two days prior, projectiles started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, violent explosions. The web was entirely disconnected. I was in my flat, rendering a book about what it means to move words across tongues, and the principles and anxieties of taking on another’s voice. As structures came down, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of significance.

Everything stopped. A book my publisher had been about to go to print was halted when the facility shut down. Retailers closed one by one. One night, when the booms were too close, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the bookshelves in my apartment, holding lexicons, hard-to-find volumes I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That library was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Distance and Loss

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous towns – 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 factory was ablaze, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and danger seemed to chase them.

During those days, feelings moved through the city like weather: swift fear, apprehension, righteous anger at the unfairness, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and references that the craft demands.

Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every window was destroyed, the furniture lay damaged, objects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an easel, choosing not to let quiet and dirt have the last word.

Converting Sorrow

A photograph circulated on social media of a young poet who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her poem went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an older woman dashing between alleyways, calling a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some repressed recollection. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

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

The Work as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst ruin, I found myself rendering a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep 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 aiming at the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all yearned for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond a skill: it was an act of resistance, of holding one's ground, of enduring.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his confinement, asking for more resources, insisting that language study become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, hope, practice, foundation, and analogy” all at once.

A Scarred Voice

And then came the picture. I spotted it on a website and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, scarred but surviving, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, 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 enduring.

I stared at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a political act”, but I had never felt the full weight of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else disappears. It is a persistent, stubborn refusal to vanish.