Amid those Bombed-Out Remains of an Residential Building, I Saw a Volume I Had Translated

Within the rubble of a collapsed building, a single vision stayed with me: a book I had translated from the English language to Persian, lying partially covered in dirt and soot. Its cover was torn and smudged, its sheets bent and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking.

An Urban Center Amid Assault

Two days before, missiles commenced attacking the city. There were no sirens, just abrupt, powerful explosions. The digital network was totally cut off. I was in my residence, translating a book about what it means to transport language across languages, and the morals and concerns of inhabiting a different narrative. As structures collapsed, I sat revising a text that argued, in its subtle way, for the endurance of meaning.

Everything stopped. A project my publishing house had been about to publish was stranded when the printer shut down. Retailers shut one by one. One night, when the booms were too nearby, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the bookshelves in my apartment, holding lexicons, rare editions I had spent years accumulating 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.

Distance and Grief

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be safer locations – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a industrial site was on fire, black smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly somewhere else, and peril seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods moved through the city like a front: swift fear, anxiety, righteous anger at the injustice, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and sources that translation demands.

Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the belongings lay damaged, objects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, painting at an easel, choosing not to let quiet and dust have the final say.

Converting Pain

A photograph was shared digitally of a 23-year-old artist who was died when missiles struck a building. Her poem went spread rapidly alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman dashing between alleys, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a war 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 translating, in our own way: changing destruction into art, loss into verse, grief into quest.

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst devastation, I found myself rendering a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant 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 striving for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond a skill: it was an act of defiance, 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 philosopher in his prison cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that language study become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, aspiration, rigor, anchor, and metaphor” all at once.

An Enduring Work

And then came the picture. I saw it on a news site and saw that, amid 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, drained 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 apparent – scarred, but enduring.

I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a act with consequences”, 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 obliterated. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else falls away. It is a persistent, stubborn refusal to vanish.