Among those Devastated Debris of an Residential Building, I Found a Volume I’d Rendered

In the debris of a destroyed apartment block, a particular image stayed with me: a tome I had rendered from the English language to Farsi, lying partially covered in dust and ash. Its cover was shredded and smudged, its leaves bent and singed, but it was still legible. Still communicating.

An Urban Center Under Attack

Two days before, rockets commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, forceful detonations. The web was totally cut off. I was in my flat, translating a book about what it means to move words across tongues, and the ethics and anxieties of taking on another’s narrative. As buildings came down, I sat revising a text that argued, in its quiet way, for the persistence of purpose.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to go to print was stuck when the printing house ceased operations. Retailers 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 dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, holding reference books, rare editions I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That library was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Distance and Devastation

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure locations – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a picture: in the background, a plant was burning, thick smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions passed over the city like a storm: swift fear, unease, righteous anger 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 look-ups and references that the work demands.

Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their sashes; at a relative's house, every window was destroyed, the furniture lay broken, objects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an easel, declining to let quiet and dirt 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 writing went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an elderly woman running between passages, yelling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried memory. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: turning destruction into picture, demise into verse, grief into search.

The Work as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst devastation, I found myself rendering a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet continued working until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility 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 defiance, of remaining, of enduring.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his prison cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that translation become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, goal, rigor, support, and analogy” all at once.

A Scarred Work

And then came the photograph. I spotted it on a website and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, scarred but intact, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been devoid of color, stripped of life among the debris and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but persisting.

I stared 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 fire, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, stubborn declination to be silenced.