Among those Bombed-Out Remains of an Residential Building, I Saw a Volume I Had Rendered

Within the rubble of a fallen building, a single sight stayed with me: a tome I had converted from the English language to Persian, resting partially covered in dust and ash. Its jacket was torn and smudged, its sheets bent and scorched, but it was still readable. Still communicating.

An Urban Center During Attack

Two days before, rockets began striking the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, forceful explosions. The internet was entirely cut off. I was in my residence, working on a work about what it means to transport words across cultures, and the principles and anxieties of taking on someone else's perspective. As structures collapsed, I sat editing a text that argued, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything halted. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to publish was stuck when the printing house shut down. Retailers locked their doors one by one. One night, when the explosions were too nearby, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop thinking about the shelves in my apartment, holding dictionaries, rare books 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 survive the night.

Distance and Loss

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure locations – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a photo: in the faraway, a plant was on fire, dark smoke spiraling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to pursue them.

During those days, feelings moved through the city like weather: sudden fear, apprehension, indignation at the wrong, then detachment. Beyond the personal impact, the bombardment destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick searches and materials that the work demands.

Outside, concussive forces ripped windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every pane was destroyed, the belongings lay ruined, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an stand, refusing to let quiet and dust have the final say.

Converting Sorrow

A image spread online of a young artist who was died when missiles struck a building. Her writing went was widely shared next to her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman dashing between alleys, yelling a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: transforming ruin into picture, loss into lines, sorrow into quest.

Translation as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by ruin, I found myself rendering 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 significant meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted creating until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all longed for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than a skill: it was an act of defiance, of holding one's ground, of persisting.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his prison cell, asking for more books, insisting that translation become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, hope, discipline, foundation, and symbol” all at once.

A Marked Legacy

And then came the photograph. I saw it on a website and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, damaged but surviving, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, stripped of life among the rubble and ruins. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but surviving.

I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a act with consequences”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under attack, 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 endure when everything else crumbles. It is a subtle, determined rejection to vanish.