Amid those Ruined Remains of an Residential Building, I Saw a Volume I’d Rendered

Within the wreckage of a fallen structure, a solitary image lingered with me: a volume I had converted from English to Farsi, sitting half-buried in dirt and soot. Its front was ripped and smudged, its sheets curled and singed, but it was still legible. Still communicating.

An Urban Center Under Attack

Two days prior, rockets began striking the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, powerful detonations. The digital network was totally cut off. I was in my residence, working on a text about what it means to move words across languages, and the principles and concerns of inhabiting another’s perspective. As buildings collapsed, I sat editing a text that argued, in its subtle way, for the persistence of purpose.

Everything ceased. A project my publishing house had been about to publish was halted when the printing house shut down. Shops closed 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 dwelling on the library in my apartment, holding reference books, hard-to-find volumes 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 Grief

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be safer towns – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a picture: in the faraway, a industrial site was burning, black smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like weather: instant fear, anxiety, moral outrage at the wrong, then detachment. Beyond the personal impact, the attack destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick searches and materials that translation demands.

Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their casings; at a family member's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the furniture lay damaged, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, creating at an easel, refusing to let silence and dirt have the ultimate victory.

Translating Grief

A picture spread digitally of a young poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her poem went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an aged woman dashing between alleys, shouting a name. People said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some repressed memory. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: turning devastation into image, loss into poetry, sorrow into longing.

Translation as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself working on a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet persisted working until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all longed 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 enduring.

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

An Enduring Voice

And then came the photograph. I saw it on a platform and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, scarred but surviving, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been devoid of color, drained of life among the concrete and ruins. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but surviving.

I gazed upon 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 was important”. 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 persistent, unyielding declination to be silenced.