Among those Bombed-Out Remains of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Volume I Had Rendered

Within the wreckage of a fallen building, a solitary image stayed with me: a tome I had translated from the English language to Farsi, lying partially covered in dust and soot. Its front was shredded and dirtied, its sheets bent and scorched, but it was still legible. Still uttering words.

A Metropolis During Attack

Two days before, projectiles started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, powerful detonations. The digital network was entirely cut off. I was in my residence, translating a work about what it means to carry language across tongues, and the morals and concerns of inhabiting a different perspective. As edifices collapsed, I sat editing a text that suggested, in its subtle way, for the persistence of meaning.

Everything halted. A manuscript my publisher had been about to send to press was stuck when the printer shut down. Shops shut one by one. One night, when the explosions were too close, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop thinking about the library in my apartment, filled with lexicons, rare books 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 make it through the night.

Dispersal and Grief

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be safer towns – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a plant was ablaze, thick smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods moved through the city like a storm: swift dread, anxiety, righteous anger at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and sources that translation demands.

Outside, blast waves ripped windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the belongings lay damaged, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an easel, refusing to let stillness and debris have the last word.

Translating Pain

A photograph circulated on social media of a 23-year-old artist who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her verse went viral alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an older woman dashing between alleyways, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some repressed remembrance. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: transforming devastation into image, demise into lines, grief into longing.

Translation as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still amidst destruction, I found myself rendering a fable about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep 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 reaching for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all desired – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond literary craft: it was an act of defiance, of remaining, of persisting.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that linguistic work become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, hope, discipline, foundation, and symbol” all at once.

A Marked Legacy

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 renditions, damaged but surviving, my name shown 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 apparent – scarred, but persisting.

I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a political act”, 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 carry stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else falls away. It is a persistent, stubborn refusal to disappear.