Within the Devastated Remains of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Volume I Had Rendered

Among the debris of a collapsed structure, a solitary image stayed with me: a volume I had rendered from English to Farsi, lying partly concealed in dust and soot. Its jacket was torn and stained, its sheets curled and singed, but it was still legible. Still communicating.

An Urban Center Under Attack

Two days earlier, missiles began striking the city. There were no sirens, just abrupt, powerful blasts. The web was totally cut off. I was in my residence, working on a work about what it means to carry text across tongues, and the morals and worries of taking on someone else's perspective. As buildings came down, I sat revising a text that argued, in its quiet way, for the persistence of purpose.

Everything halted. A book my publisher had been about to publish was stuck when the printing house closed. Shops locked their doors one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the library in my apartment, filled with reference books, hard-to-find volumes I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That library was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through 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 struck. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a photo: in the distance, a industrial site was ablaze, thick smoke coiling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods swept through the city like a storm: swift dread, anxiety, indignation at the unfairness, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate searches and materials that translation demands.

Outside, concussive forces ripped windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every window was broken, the belongings lay damaged, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an stand, refusing to let silence and debris have the last word.

Transforming Grief

A photograph was shared on social media of a young artist who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her poem went viral with her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an older woman hurrying between alleys, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some repressed remembrance. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: changing destruction into picture, demise into verse, sorrow into search.

The Work as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of ruin, I found myself translating a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted producing until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all desired – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than an art form: it was an act of resistance, of staying put, of holding on.

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

An Enduring Work

And then came the picture. I saw it on a website and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, damaged but whole, my name printed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, drained 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 seen – scarred, but persisting.

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 erased. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else crumbles. It is a subtle, stubborn rejection to vanish.