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

Within the rubble of a fallen building, a particular image remained with me: a book I had converted from the English language to Persian, resting partly concealed in dust and soot. Its jacket was ripped and stained, its pages curled and singed, but it was still readable. Still communicating.

An Urban Center Under Attack

Two days prior, missiles started hitting the city. There were no sirens, just unexpected, violent detonations. The digital network was entirely cut off. I was in my flat, translating a book about what it means to move text across languages, and the morals and worries of taking on a different perspective. As edifices came down, I sat editing a text that argued, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of significance.

Everything stopped. A book my publisher had been about to publish was halted when the facility closed. Shops closed one by one. One night, when the booms were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the library in my apartment, filled with reference books, hard-to-find books I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Separation and Devastation

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous towns – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a picture: in the background, a plant was burning, dark smoke coiling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, feelings swept through the city like a front: swift dread, apprehension, righteous anger at the unfairness, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and materials that translation demands.

Outside, concussive forces ripped windows from their sashes; at a family member's house, every window was broken, the belongings lay ruined, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, creating at an stand, refusing to let silence and debris have the last word.

Converting Grief

A picture circulated digitally of a 23-year-old writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an elderly woman dashing between passages, shouting a name. People said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some buried remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

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

The Work as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself working on a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet kept working until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all yearned for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than a skill: it was an act of perseverance, of staying put, of persisting.

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

A Marked Legacy

And then came the image. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, damaged but whole, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, devoid of life among the rubble and debris. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but persisting.

I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else falls away. It is a persistent, stubborn refusal to be silenced.