Within those Ruined Remains of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Volume I’d Translated

Within the debris of a collapsed structure, a particular image lingered with me: a volume I had translated from English to Farsi, sitting partially covered in dust and ash. Its jacket was torn and dirtied, its leaves bent and burned, but it was still readable. Still communicating.

A Metropolis During Assault

Two days earlier, missiles began striking the city. There were no warnings, just sudden, forceful detonations. The digital network was entirely severed. I was in my apartment, working on a book about what it means to move words across languages, and the principles and worries of taking on someone else's voice. As buildings collapsed, I sat editing a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of significance.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publisher had been about to send to press was halted when the printing house ceased operations. Bookstores locked their doors one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, filled with lexicons, hard-to-find editions 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.

Dispersal and Devastation

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous towns – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a image: in the distance, a plant was burning, black smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and danger seemed to pursue them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like weather: instant dread, apprehension, indignation at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick searches and materials that the work demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their frames; at a relative's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the possessions lay broken, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, painting at an stand, choosing not to let stillness and debris have the ultimate victory.

Translating Pain

A photograph was shared online of a 23-year-old poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman dashing between alleys, shouting a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some repressed recollection. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: transforming destruction into picture, death into poetry, sorrow into longing.

The Craft as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by ruin, I found myself rendering a fable about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep 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 unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all longed for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond an art form: it was an act of perseverance, of staying put, of persisting.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his confinement, asking for more resources, insisting that translation become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, hope, discipline, foundation, and analogy” all at once.

A Scarred Voice

And then came the image. I spotted it on a website and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, marked but intact, my name printed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been black and white, devoid of life among the debris and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but surviving.

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 mattered”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else falls away. It is a subtle, determined declination to vanish.