Amid the Bombed-Out Debris of an Residential Building, I Saw a Volume I’d Rendered

In the rubble of a fallen building, a solitary image remained with me: a volume I had translated from the English language to Farsi, resting partially covered in dirt and ash. Its jacket was shredded and dirtied, its pages curled and singed, but it was still readable. Still speaking.

A City During Bombardment

Two days before, rockets started hitting the city. There were no sirens, just unexpected, forceful explosions. The digital network was entirely cut off. I was in my flat, rendering a work about what it means to transport text across tongues, and the principles and anxieties of inhabiting another’s perspective. As edifices came down, I sat editing a text that contended, in its subtle way, for the endurance of meaning.

Everything ceased. A manuscript my publisher had been about to publish was stranded when the printer ceased operations. Bookstores locked their doors one by one. One night, when the explosions were too close, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, holding lexicons, valuable volumes I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Dispersal and Devastation

My partner 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 photo: in the faraway, a industrial site was on fire, dark smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly far away, and threat seemed to pursue them.

During those days, moods moved through the city like a storm: instant terror, unease, moral outrage at the unfairness, then numbness. Beyond the emotional toll, the attack eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant look-ups and references that the craft demands.

Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every pane was shattered, the furniture lay broken, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an stand, declining to let quiet and dirt have the ultimate victory.

Translating Pain

A photograph was shared digitally of a young writer who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her verse went viral with her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an elderly woman running between passages, calling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some repressed remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: changing destruction into art, demise into verse, grief into longing.

The Craft as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still amidst ruin, I found myself rendering a fable about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet continued 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 striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than an art form: it was an act of perseverance, of remaining, of enduring.

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

An Enduring Legacy

And then came the image. I saw it on a platform and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, marked but intact, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, drained of life among the debris and ruins. For most of my career, I had been invisible, 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 statement”, but I had never felt the full weight of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, stubborn refusal to disappear.