Within those Devastated Remains of an Residential Building, I Saw a Volume I’d Rendered

In the debris of a fallen structure, a particular sight lingered with me: a book I had converted from English to Persian, resting half-buried in dust and ash. Its jacket was ripped and dirtied, its sheets curled and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating.

An Urban Center Under Assault

Two days prior, rockets began striking the city. There were no sirens, just unexpected, violent detonations. The digital network was totally severed. I was in my apartment, rendering a text about what it means to carry words across tongues, and the principles and anxieties of taking on another’s voice. As buildings collapsed, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the endurance of meaning.

Everything ceased. A book my publisher had been about to go to print was stranded when the printing house ceased operations. Bookstores closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop worrying about the library in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, rare books I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Separation and Loss

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure locations – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a photo: in the faraway, a plant was on fire, dark smoke coiling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly somewhere else, and danger seemed to chase them.

During those days, moods moved through the city like a front: instant dread, unease, righteous anger at the unfairness, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the bombardment eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick look-ups and references that the work demands.

Outside, blast waves ripped windows from their frames; at a relative's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the belongings lay broken, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, painting at an stand, declining to let silence and debris have the last word.

Translating Sorrow

A image circulated online of a 23-year-old writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an elderly woman hurrying between alleyways, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some buried recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: transforming ruin into image, loss into poetry, grief into longing.

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself rendering a fable about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet kept producing until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all desired – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond an art form: it was an act of defiance, of remaining, of holding on.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker 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, aspiration, practice, foundation, and symbol” all at once.

A Scarred Voice

And then came the image. I noticed it on a website and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, damaged but whole, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, stripped of life among the concrete and ruins. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but surviving.

I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a act with consequences”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, 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 persist when everything else disappears. It is a subtle, determined refusal to vanish.