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

Within the wreckage of a collapsed building, a solitary vision lingered with me: a book I had converted from the English language to Persian, resting partially covered in dirt and soot. Its jacket was shredded and stained, its leaves curled and scorched, but it was still readable. Still uttering words.

A Metropolis During Bombardment

Two days earlier, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no sirens, just abrupt, forceful explosions. The web was entirely disconnected. I was in my apartment, rendering a text about what it means to transport words across languages, and the morals and anxieties of inhabiting a different narrative. As edifices collapsed, I sat revising a text that argued, in its quiet way, for the persistence of significance.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to go to print was stuck when the printer closed. Retailers shut one by one. One night, when the booms were too close, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop thinking about the shelves in my apartment, holding reference books, valuable volumes I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That library was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Distance and Grief

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous towns – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a photo: in the distance, a industrial site was on fire, dark smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and danger seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods swept through the city like a storm: instant terror, unease, righteous anger at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick queries and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces blew windows from their sashes; at a family member's house, every pane was broken, the possessions lay ruined, objects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, creating at an easel, declining to let stillness and dust have the ultimate victory.

Translating Grief

A image was shared digitally of a 23-year-old artist who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral alongside her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an older woman hurrying between passages, yelling a name. People said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some buried remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: transforming ruin into art, loss into poetry, sorrow into longing.

The Craft as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself rendering a fable about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet continued working until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond a skill: it was an act of perseverance, of holding one's ground, of holding on.

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

An Enduring Voice

And then came the picture. I saw it on a news site and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, marked but intact, my name printed 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 anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but persisting.

I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a political act”, 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 obliterated. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else disappears. It is a subtle, determined rejection to be silenced.