Among those Devastated Debris of an Residential Building, I Saw a Volume I Had Rendered

In the wreckage of a destroyed structure, a solitary image remained with me: a tome I had translated from the English language to Persian, lying half-buried in dust and soot. Its jacket was ripped and stained, its pages bent and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still uttering words.

An Urban Center During Attack

Two days before, projectiles started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just sudden, powerful explosions. The digital network was totally severed. I was in my flat, rendering a work about what it means to carry language across languages, and the principles and worries of inhabiting someone else's perspective. As buildings came down, I sat polishing a text that argued, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything stopped. A project my publishing house had been about to publish was halted when the printer ceased operations. Retailers locked their doors one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, stocked with reference books, hard-to-find books I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That library was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Distance and Grief

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be safer areas – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a photo: in the faraway, a plant was ablaze, thick smoke spiraling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and danger seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like a front: instant terror, apprehension, moral outrage at the injustice, then apathy. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant look-ups and references that the work demands.

Outside, concussive forces ripped windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the furniture lay ruined, objects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an easel, declining to let silence and debris have the ultimate victory.

Transforming Grief

A picture circulated digitally of a 23-year-old poet who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral with her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman running between passages, yelling a name. People said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some buried memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: transforming destruction into picture, demise into lines, grief into quest.

Translation as Persistence

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 grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet persisted creating until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond a skill: it was an act of resistance, of holding one's ground, of holding on.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his confinement, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that translation become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, hope, practice, anchor, and metaphor” all at once.

A Marked Legacy

And then came the image. I saw it on a platform and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, damaged but intact, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, drained of life among the rubble and debris. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but enduring.

I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a political act”, but I had never felt the complete significance 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 haul stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else disappears. It is a subtle, unyielding rejection to vanish.