Amid those Ruined Debris of an Residential Building, I Saw a Volume I’d Rendered

In the wreckage of a destroyed building, a particular sight lingered with me: a tome I had converted from English to Farsi, sitting half-buried in dust and ash. Its front was ripped and stained, its sheets bent and scorched, but it was still readable. Still speaking.

A City Amid Assault

Two days earlier, rockets began striking the city. There were no sirens, just abrupt, powerful detonations. The internet was totally cut off. I was in my apartment, working on a work about what it means to carry text across tongues, and the morals and worries of taking on a different perspective. As edifices collapsed, I sat editing a text that suggested, in its subtle way, for the endurance of meaning.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publisher had been about to go to print was stuck when the printing house shut down. Bookstores locked their doors one by one. One night, when the explosions were too close, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the library in my apartment, filled with reference books, rare editions I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Dispersal and Loss

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be safer locations – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a photo: in the faraway, a industrial site was burning, black smoke curling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, moods moved through the city like a front: sudden fear, anxiety, moral outrage at the unfairness, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate searches and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, blast waves tore windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the possessions lay ruined, objects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an easel, refusing to let stillness and dirt have the ultimate victory.

Transforming Sorrow

A photograph circulated on social media of a 23-year-old artist who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an elderly 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 stirred some deep-seated memory. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: turning ruin into image, loss into poetry, sorrow into longing.

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst destruction, I found myself working on a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet persisted producing until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all yearned for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth striving for.

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

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that translation become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, goal, discipline, anchor, and symbol” all at once.

A Marked Legacy

And then came the image. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, damaged but intact, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been devoid of color, devoid of life among the debris and ruins. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but surviving.

I stared at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a act with consequences”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, unyielding refusal to be silenced.