Within the Devastated Remains of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Book I Had Rendered

Among the wreckage of a destroyed structure, a particular vision remained with me: a volume I had translated from the English language to Farsi, resting half-buried in dust and ash. Its jacket was ripped and stained, its pages curled and scorched, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking.

A City Under Assault

Two days before, missiles commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just sudden, violent detonations. The digital network was entirely severed. I was in my apartment, rendering a work about what it means to transport text across languages, and the morals and anxieties of occupying someone else's perspective. As buildings came down, I sat revising a text that suggested, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything ceased. A manuscript my publisher had been about to send to press was stuck when the facility ceased operations. Retailers shut one by one. One night, when the explosions were too imminent, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop thinking about the library in my apartment, stocked with lexicons, valuable books I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Distance and Loss

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous 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 photo: in the background, a plant was burning, black smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like weather: instant dread, anxiety, moral outrage at the wrong, then detachment. Beyond the personal impact, the bombardment eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and references that the work demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their casings; at a family member's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the belongings lay broken, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an easel, refusing to let silence and dust have the last word.

Transforming Pain

A picture was shared on social media of a young writer who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an elderly woman hurrying between alleyways, yelling a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some repressed remembrance. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

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

The Work as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of ruin, I found myself translating a fable about a king whose daughter will recover 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 continued producing until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all desired – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than literary craft: it was an act of defiance, of holding one's ground, 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 prison cell, asking for more books, insisting that translation become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, hope, discipline, anchor, and symbol” all at once.

A Scarred Voice

And then came the photograph. I noticed it on a news site and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, damaged but surviving, my name displayed 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 wreckage. For most of my career, I had been unseen, 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 political act”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else crumbles. It is a subtle, determined declination to vanish.