Within the Bombed-Out Debris of an Residential Building, I Found a Volume I’d Rendered

In the debris of a fallen building, a solitary image remained with me: a tome I had converted from English to Persian, resting partially covered in dust and ash. Its jacket was shredded and smudged, its pages bent and singed, but it was still legible. Still speaking.

An Urban Center During Bombardment

Two days prior, missiles started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just sudden, forceful explosions. The internet was totally cut off. I was in my apartment, working on a book about what it means to transport language across cultures, and the ethics and worries of occupying someone else's voice. As edifices collapsed, I sat revising a text that argued, in its subtle way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything halted. A manuscript my publisher had been about to go to print was stranded when the printing house closed. Bookstores locked their doors one by one. One night, when the booms were too close, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop worrying about the bookshelves in my apartment, stocked with reference books, rare 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 survive the night.

Separation and Grief

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be safer locations – 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 faraway, a industrial site was burning, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly somewhere else, and danger seemed to pursue them.

During those days, emotions passed over the city like weather: swift fear, apprehension, moral outrage at the injustice, then apathy. Beyond the personal impact, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick searches and references that translation demands.

Outside, blast waves blew windows from their frames; at a relative's house, every pane was broken, the possessions lay ruined, household items scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an stand, choosing not to let stillness and dust have the last word.

Translating Pain

A photograph spread digitally of a 23-year-old artist who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her verse went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an aged woman dashing between alleyways, yelling a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some deep-seated memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: turning ruin into picture, loss into lines, mourning into longing.

The Work as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of ruin, I found myself rendering a fable about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet continued working until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all yearned for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than an art form: it was an act of defiance, of remaining, of persisting.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his prison cell, asking for more resources, insisting that language study become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, hope, rigor, anchor, and analogy” all at once.

A Scarred Legacy

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

I stared at 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 bombardment, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, stubborn rejection to vanish.