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

Within the wreckage of a fallen apartment block, a single vision remained with me: a book I had rendered from the English language to Farsi, resting partially covered in dirt and ash. Its jacket was ripped and dirtied, its leaves curled and burned, but it was still legible. Still uttering words.

A Metropolis Under Attack

Two days earlier, missiles began striking the city. There were no sirens, just abrupt, forceful blasts. The digital network was entirely severed. I was in my apartment, translating a text about what it means to transport text across cultures, and the morals and worries of inhabiting someone else's voice. As structures fell, I sat editing a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the endurance of meaning.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publisher had been about to send to press was stuck when the printing house closed. Bookstores closed one by one. One night, when the booms were too nearby, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the library in my apartment, stocked with lexicons, rare books I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Separation and Grief

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be safer areas – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a picture: in the distance, a plant was on fire, dark smoke spiraling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions passed over the city like weather: sudden fear, apprehension, righteous anger at the injustice, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate searches and references that the work demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their frames; at a relative's house, every pane was shattered, the furniture lay damaged, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an stand, declining to let silence and debris have the ultimate victory.

Translating Grief

A photograph was shared online of a young writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an older woman dashing between passages, yelling a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some buried recollection. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: changing devastation into image, demise into poetry, grief into search.

The Craft as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, 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 kept creating until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all longed for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth pursuing.

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

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his cell, asking for more resources, insisting that language study become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, aspiration, rigor, anchor, and metaphor” all at once.

A Marked Voice

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 works, damaged but whole, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, stripped of life among the rubble and debris. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but surviving.

I looked at 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 obliterated. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else falls away. It is a quiet, stubborn declination to disappear.