Amid those Bombed-Out Debris of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Volume I’d Rendered

In the wreckage of a collapsed apartment block, a particular image lingered with me: a volume I had translated from English to Persian, lying partially covered in dust and ash. Its cover was ripped and dirtied, its leaves curled and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking.

A City During Assault

Two days before, projectiles began striking the city. There were no sirens, just unexpected, powerful detonations. The internet was totally severed. I was in my residence, rendering a work about what it means to carry words across cultures, and the morals and anxieties of occupying another’s perspective. As buildings came down, I sat polishing a text that argued, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of significance.

Everything stopped. A book my publisher had been about to send to press was stranded when the printer shut down. Bookstores closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, filled with reference books, rare books I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Dispersal and Devastation

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure locations – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a image: in the background, a factory was ablaze, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to follow them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like a storm: sudden dread, anxiety, righteous anger at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate queries and references that the work demands.

Outside, concussive forces blew windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the possessions lay damaged, objects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, painting at an stand, declining to let silence and dust have the ultimate victory.

Converting Pain

A image circulated on social media of a 23-year-old artist who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her poem went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an elderly woman running between alleys, shouting a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: transforming devastation into art, death into verse, mourning into longing.

Translation as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself working on a fable 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 experienced the loss of his sight yet kept working until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all yearned for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth striving for.

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

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his prison cell, asking for more books, insisting that language study become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, goal, discipline, foundation, and analogy” all at once.

A Marked Voice

And then came the photograph. I spotted it on a website and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, marked but whole, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, drained of life among the rubble and ruins. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but enduring.

I stared at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else disappears. It is a subtle, stubborn rejection to vanish.