Within the Bombed-Out Remains of an Residential Building, I Saw a Volume I Had Translated

In the rubble of a destroyed structure, a solitary vision stayed with me: a book I had converted from the English language to Persian, resting partially covered in dust and soot. Its cover was shredded and smudged, its leaves bent and singed, but it was still readable. Still speaking.

A City During Assault

Two days prior, projectiles started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, violent blasts. The digital network was totally severed. I was in my residence, working on a text about what it means to carry words across tongues, and the morals and anxieties of taking on a different narrative. As edifices fell, I sat editing a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of significance.

Everything stopped. A project my publishing house had been about to go to print was stranded when the printing house closed. Shops closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, holding lexicons, rare books I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That library was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Distance and Grief

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous towns – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the background, a factory was burning, thick smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to follow them.

During those days, feelings moved through the city like a front: swift terror, anxiety, righteous anger at the unfairness, then numbness. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their sashes; at a relative's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the possessions lay broken, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an stand, refusing to let stillness and dirt have the ultimate victory.

Converting Pain

A image was shared on social media of a 23-year-old artist who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly alongside her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an older woman hurrying between passages, calling a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some repressed remembrance. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: transforming destruction into art, demise into poetry, sorrow into search.

The Work as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of devastation, I found myself working on a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet kept creating until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all desired – 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 resistance, of remaining, of enduring.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that language study become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, goal, discipline, support, and metaphor” all at once.

A Scarred Work

And then came the image. I saw it on a website and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, damaged but surviving, 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 concrete and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but surviving.

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 attack, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, stubborn declination to vanish.