Among the Bombed-Out Remains of an Residential Building, I Saw a Book I Had Rendered

Among the debris of a fallen building, a particular vision remained with me: a volume I had converted from the English language to Persian, resting half-buried in dust and ash. Its cover was torn and smudged, its pages bent and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking.

A City During Bombardment

Two days earlier, projectiles began striking the city. There were no warnings, just sudden, violent blasts. The digital network was completely disconnected. I was in my apartment, translating a text about what it means to move text across languages, and the morals and anxieties of inhabiting a different perspective. As edifices fell, I sat editing a text that argued, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything halted. A book my publishing house had been about to go to print was stranded when the printing house shut down. Shops closed one by one. One night, when the booms were too close, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the library in my apartment, filled with dictionaries, rare editions I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Separation and Grief

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be safer towns – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a image: in the distance, a factory was burning, thick smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like a storm: sudden terror, unease, moral outrage at the unfairness, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the attack destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and sources that the craft demands.

Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their sashes; at a family member's house, every pane was destroyed, the possessions lay ruined, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, painting at an easel, refusing to let stillness and dirt have the ultimate victory.

Translating Grief

A picture was shared on social media of a 23-year-old writer who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an elderly woman dashing between passages, calling a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some deep-seated recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: turning devastation into picture, death into poetry, sorrow into quest.

The Craft as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself working on a fable about a king whose daughter will recover 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 kept working until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all yearned for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than literary craft: it was an act of perseverance, 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 leader in his prison cell, asking for more resources, insisting that linguistic work become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, hope, rigor, anchor, and symbol” all at once.

An Enduring Voice

And then came the picture. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, damaged but surviving, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, devoid of life among the rubble and ruins. 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 statement”, but I had never felt the complete significance 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 transport stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else disappears. It is a subtle, determined declination to vanish.