Within the Devastated Remains of an Residential Building, I Found a Volume I Had Rendered

Within the rubble of a destroyed building, a solitary vision stayed with me: a tome I had converted from the English language to Farsi, resting half-buried in dust and ash. Its jacket was ripped and stained, its sheets curled and singed, but it was still readable. Still speaking.

A Metropolis During Assault

Two days prior, projectiles began striking the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, violent explosions. The digital network was totally disconnected. I was in my apartment, translating a book about what it means to transport language across cultures, and the morals and concerns of inhabiting someone else's narrative. As buildings collapsed, I sat polishing a text that contended, in its understated way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to go to print was halted when the printing house ceased operations. Bookstores locked their doors one by one. One night, when the explosions were too nearby, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the bookshelves in my apartment, stocked with lexicons, valuable editions I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Distance and Grief

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous locations – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a picture: in the distance, a industrial site was ablaze, thick smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and danger seemed to pursue them.

During those days, moods passed over the city like a storm: swift terror, unease, moral outrage at the wrong, then numbness. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate searches and sources that translation demands.

Outside, blast waves blew windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every window was shattered, the possessions lay broken, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, creating at an stand, choosing not to let stillness and dirt have the ultimate victory.

Transforming Pain

A photograph was shared on social media of a young writer who was died when missiles struck a building. Her poem went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an older woman dashing between passages, yelling a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some deep-seated memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: transforming devastation into art, demise into poetry, grief into quest.

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst devastation, I found myself translating a fable about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet continued producing until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all longed for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than a skill: it was an act of defiance, of staying put, of holding on.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his confinement, asking for more books, insisting that translation become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, goal, rigor, anchor, and analogy” all at once.

A Scarred Work

And then came the image. I saw it on a website and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, damaged but surviving, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been devoid of color, drained of life among the concrete and debris. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – 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 full weight of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else disappears. It is a persistent, stubborn refusal to be silenced.