Among the Bombed-Out Remains of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Volume I’d Rendered

Among the rubble of a destroyed apartment block, a particular sight stayed with me: a book I had rendered from the English language to Persian, resting half-buried in dirt and soot. Its cover was torn and smudged, its pages curled and singed, but it was still legible. Still speaking.

An Urban Center During Assault

Two days earlier, projectiles began striking the city. There were no warnings, just sudden, powerful explosions. The web was totally severed. I was in my apartment, rendering a book about what it means to transport text across tongues, and the morals and worries of inhabiting someone else's voice. As buildings came down, I sat polishing a text that argued, in its quiet way, for the endurance of meaning.

Everything halted. A book my publishing house had been about to publish was halted when the facility closed. Bookstores shut one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, filled with dictionaries, hard-to-find books I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Separation and Loss

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be safer towns – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a image: in the distance, a plant was burning, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like a storm: swift fear, anxiety, righteous anger at the injustice, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick searches and sources that the craft demands.

Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every window was shattered, the belongings lay damaged, personal effects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, working at an easel, choosing not to let quiet and dust have the ultimate victory.

Converting Grief

A image was shared digitally of a young artist who was died when missiles struck a building. Her writing went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an elderly woman running between passages, shouting a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some deep-seated memory. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: changing ruin into image, death into verse, sorrow into quest.

The Craft as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still amidst destruction, I found myself working on a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted producing 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 striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than an art form: it was an act of perseverance, of holding one's ground, of persisting.

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

A Scarred Work

And then came the image. I spotted it on a platform and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, damaged but surviving, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, stripped of life among the debris and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but surviving.

I stared at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a act with consequences”, but I had never felt the full weight of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, determined declination to disappear.