Within those Ruined Debris of an Residential Building, I Found a Volume I Had Translated

Among the rubble of a fallen structure, a solitary sight stayed with me: a tome I had converted from English to Farsi, sitting half-buried in dust and soot. Its cover was ripped and dirtied, its pages curled and singed, but it was still readable. Still speaking.

A Metropolis During Attack

Two days earlier, rockets began striking the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, powerful explosions. The digital network was completely cut off. I was in my apartment, rendering a work about what it means to move words across tongues, and the ethics and concerns of taking on a different narrative. As edifices collapsed, I sat revising a text that argued, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to go to print was stuck when the printing house closed. Retailers locked their doors one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the library in my apartment, filled with lexicons, hard-to-find editions I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Distance and Grief

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure locations – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a industrial site was ablaze, thick smoke curling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods moved through the city like weather: sudden dread, unease, moral outrage at the wrong, then numbness. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick searches and materials that the work demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the possessions lay broken, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, creating at an stand, choosing not to let silence and debris have the ultimate victory.

Converting Grief

A photograph was shared digitally of a 23-year-old artist who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went was widely shared next to her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an elderly woman dashing between passages, calling a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some repressed recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: transforming devastation into image, death into lines, mourning into longing.

The Craft as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself working on a fable about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet kept producing until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all desired – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than a skill: it was an act of defiance, of staying put, of holding on.

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

An Enduring Voice

And then came the picture. I saw it on a news site and saw that, amid 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 color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, drained of life among the debris and ruins. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but surviving.

I looked 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 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 subtle, stubborn declination to vanish.