Within those Ruined Remains of an Residential Building, I Saw a Volume I Had Rendered

Among the wreckage of a fallen building, a solitary sight lingered with me: a volume I had rendered from English to Persian, sitting partly concealed in dirt and ash. Its jacket was torn and smudged, its pages bent and scorched, but it was still readable. Still uttering words.

An Urban Center Amid Assault

Two days before, missiles started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, powerful detonations. The internet was entirely severed. I was in my residence, working on a text about what it means to transport words across tongues, and the morals and anxieties of taking on another’s perspective. As buildings collapsed, I sat revising a text that argued, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything halted. A project my publishing house had been about to publish was stuck when the printing house closed. Retailers closed one by one. One night, when the booms were too imminent, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the bookshelves in my apartment, filled with lexicons, hard-to-find editions I had spent years collecting 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 survive the night.

Separation and Loss

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure towns – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a photo: in the background, a industrial site was burning, dark smoke coiling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly far away, and threat seemed to chase them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like a front: swift dread, apprehension, indignation at the unfairness, then numbness. Beyond the emotional toll, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and materials that translation demands.

Outside, concussive forces ripped windows from their sashes; at a relative's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the furniture lay broken, personal effects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, painting at an easel, declining to let quiet and dirt have the ultimate victory.

Translating Pain

A photograph was shared online of a 23-year-old writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her poem went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman hurrying between alleys, yelling a name. Locals said she had lost 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 converting, in our own way: transforming devastation into picture, death into verse, sorrow into quest.

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of destruction, I found myself rendering a fable about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet continued creating until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all desired – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond a skill: it was an act of defiance, of staying put, of persisting.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his cell, asking for more books, insisting that language study become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, goal, practice, support, and analogy” all at once.

A Marked Work

And then came the photograph. I saw it on a platform and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, marked but intact, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, stripped of life among the concrete and debris. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – 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 full weight of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, unyielding declination to be silenced.