Among those Bombed-Out Remains of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Volume I’d Rendered

Within the debris of a destroyed building, a particular sight stayed with me: a tome I had rendered from the English language to Farsi, resting partially covered in dirt and ash. Its cover was ripped and dirtied, its leaves curled and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still uttering words.

A Metropolis Under Assault

Two days before, missiles started hitting the city. There were no sirens, just sudden, forceful blasts. The web was completely cut off. I was in my apartment, working on a text about what it means to move text across languages, and the morals and worries of inhabiting another’s voice. As structures fell, I sat revising a text that argued, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of significance.

Everything ceased. A book my publisher had been about to go to print was halted when the printing house closed. Shops locked their doors one by one. One night, when the booms were too imminent, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the library in my apartment, stocked with reference books, valuable editions I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Dispersal and Grief

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous areas – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a photo: in the background, a industrial site was burning, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to follow them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like a storm: swift terror, apprehension, moral outrage at the injustice, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate searches and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every window was broken, the furniture lay damaged, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, working at an stand, declining to let quiet and dirt have the ultimate victory.

Converting Sorrow

A photograph was shared online of a 23-year-old poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went viral with her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman hurrying between alleys, shouting a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some deep-seated remembrance. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: transforming devastation into image, loss into verse, grief into longing.

The Work as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of destruction, I found myself translating a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet continued creating until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all longed 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 holding one's ground, of holding on.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his prison cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that linguistic work become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, goal, practice, anchor, and analogy” all at once.

An Enduring Voice

And then came the photograph. I noticed it on a news site and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, scarred 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 debris. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but surviving.

I stared at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a political act”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else falls away. It is a subtle, determined declination to be silenced.