Among the Ruined Debris of an Residential Building, I Found a Volume I Had Rendered

In the wreckage of a collapsed structure, a single sight remained with me: a tome I had rendered from the English language to Persian, lying partially covered in dirt and ash. Its jacket was ripped and smudged, its leaves curled and scorched, but it was still legible. Still communicating.

A Metropolis During Assault

Two days prior, rockets began striking the city. There were no alarms, just sudden, forceful explosions. The web was completely severed. I was in my apartment, working on a work about what it means to move words across cultures, and the principles and anxieties of inhabiting someone else's narrative. As buildings 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 go to print was halted when the printing house ceased operations. Bookstores shut one by one. One night, when the explosions were too close, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, holding dictionaries, rare volumes I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Dispersal and Devastation

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure areas – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a photo: in the faraway, a factory was ablaze, dark smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly elsewhere, and danger seemed to chase them.

During those days, moods swept through the city like a front: swift dread, anxiety, indignation at the injustice, then apathy. Beyond the personal impact, the bombardment eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant look-ups and sources that the craft demands.

Outside, shockwaves ripped windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every pane was broken, the furniture lay damaged, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, working at an easel, choosing not to let quiet and dust have the last word.

Transforming Pain

A photograph circulated online of a young writer who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an older woman dashing between passages, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some deep-seated remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: changing ruin into art, loss into verse, sorrow into quest.

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 get better only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet kept producing until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all yearned for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond literary craft: 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 leader in his confinement, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that language study become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, hope, discipline, anchor, and analogy” all at once.

A Marked Legacy

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

I gazed upon 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 attack, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else disappears. It is a subtle, stubborn rejection to vanish.