Within those Ruined Remains of an Residential Building, I Found a Volume I’d Rendered

In the wreckage of a fallen building, a single sight lingered with me: a book I had translated from the English language to Farsi, resting half-buried in dirt and soot. Its jacket was shredded and smudged, its sheets bent and scorched, but it was still readable. Still speaking.

An Urban Center During Attack

Two days before, rockets commenced attacking the city. There were no sirens, just unexpected, violent explosions. The web was completely severed. I was in my apartment, translating a work about what it means to move words across tongues, and the ethics and anxieties of occupying another’s voice. As structures fell, I sat revising a text that argued, in its understated way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything ceased. A book my publisher had been about to send to press was stranded when the printer shut down. Bookstores shut one by one. One night, when the booms were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop thinking about the library in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, hard-to-find books I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Distance and Loss

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure areas – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a picture: in the distance, a factory was on fire, dark smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods moved through the city like a storm: swift fear, apprehension, indignation at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick searches and sources that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces blew windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the belongings lay damaged, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, working at an stand, choosing not to let silence and debris have the final say.

Converting Grief

A photograph was shared digitally of a 23-year-old writer who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her poem went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an elderly woman dashing between alleys, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some repressed remembrance. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: transforming devastation into art, death into lines, grief into search.

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst destruction, I found myself translating a story for young readers 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 striving for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all yearned for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than a skill: it was an act of defiance, of remaining, of persisting.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his prison cell, asking for more resources, insisting that translation become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, hope, practice, support, and symbol” all at once.

A Marked Voice

And then came the image. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, marked but surviving, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, stripped of life among the concrete and ruins. 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 statement”, but I had never felt the full weight of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else disappears. It is a subtle, unyielding declination to vanish.