Within those Bombed-Out Debris of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Volume I’d Translated

In the wreckage of a fallen structure, a single sight lingered with me: a tome I had translated from English to Persian, lying partially covered in dirt and soot. Its jacket was ripped and dirtied, its leaves bent and scorched, but it was still readable. Still communicating.

An Urban Center Amid Assault

Two days before, missiles began striking the city. There were no sirens, just abrupt, violent detonations. The internet was completely severed. I was in my flat, rendering a work about what it means to transport text across languages, and the principles and concerns of occupying someone else's perspective. As buildings fell, I sat editing a text that argued, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything ceased. A project my publisher had been about to publish was halted when the facility closed. Shops locked their doors one by one. One night, when the booms were too nearby, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop worrying about the bookshelves in my apartment, filled with dictionaries, valuable volumes I had spent years collecting 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 survive the night.

Distance and Devastation

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 departing, she sent me a picture: in the distance, a plant was burning, dark smoke coiling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods passed over the city like a storm: swift terror, anxiety, moral outrage at the wrong, then apathy. Beyond the personal impact, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick look-ups and references that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces ripped windows from their frames; at a relative's house, every window was broken, the furniture lay damaged, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, creating at an stand, refusing to let stillness and dust have the ultimate victory.

Converting Pain

A image circulated online of a 23-year-old artist who was died when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an elderly woman running between alleys, yelling a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some buried remembrance. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: turning devastation into image, death into verse, grief into quest.

Translation as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself working on a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted working until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all yearned for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than an art form: it was an act of defiance, of staying put, of holding on.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a facility; 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, aspiration, discipline, support, and symbol” all at once.

A Scarred Voice

And then came the image. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, marked but surviving, my name printed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been devoid of color, drained of life among the rubble and ruins. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – 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 bombardment, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a subtle, determined refusal to vanish.