Amid the Devastated Remains of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Volume I’d Rendered

In the debris of a collapsed structure, a single image stayed with me: a tome I had translated from English to Farsi, sitting partly concealed in dirt and soot. Its cover was shredded and smudged, its pages curled and singed, but it was still legible. Still uttering words.

A Metropolis Under Attack

Two days prior, rockets commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, violent explosions. The internet was totally cut off. I was in my flat, working on a book about what it means to move language across languages, and the principles and worries of occupying a different perspective. As edifices collapsed, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its quiet way, for the persistence of significance.

Everything halted. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to go to print was stuck when the facility shut down. Shops shut one by one. One night, when the blasts were too nearby, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, holding dictionaries, hard-to-find books I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Distance and Devastation

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be safer locations – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a photo: in the distance, a plant was on fire, thick smoke coiling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, feelings moved through the city like weather: sudden terror, anxiety, moral outrage at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the emotional toll, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick queries and references that the craft demands.

Outside, blast waves tore windows from their sashes; at a relative's house, every window was broken, the belongings lay broken, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an easel, choosing not to let silence and dust have the last word.

Translating Pain

A photograph was shared digitally of a 23-year-old writer who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an elderly woman hurrying between passages, calling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some repressed remembrance. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: changing devastation into art, death into poetry, grief into search.

The Craft as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by ruin, I found myself working on a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet continued creating until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all yearned 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 remaining, of enduring.

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

A Marked Legacy

And then came the picture. I noticed it on a news site and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, damaged but surviving, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, drained of life among the concrete and debris. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but persisting.

I looked 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 bombardment, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else disappears. It is a subtle, determined declination to disappear.