Among those Devastated Debris of an Residential Building, I Saw a Volume I’d Rendered

In the debris of a fallen structure, a single vision stayed with me: a volume I had translated from English to Persian, lying partially covered in dirt and ash. Its front was ripped and stained, its leaves curled and scorched, but it was still readable. Still speaking.

An Urban Center Under Assault

Two days prior, missiles began striking the city. There were no sirens, just unexpected, forceful detonations. The internet was completely cut off. I was in my flat, translating a text about what it means to carry language across languages, and the principles and anxieties of occupying someone else's voice. As edifices fell, I sat revising a text that contended, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of significance.

Everything ceased. A project my publishing house had been about to send to press was halted when the facility ceased operations. Bookstores closed one by one. One night, when the booms were too close, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop thinking about the bookshelves in my apartment, filled with reference books, valuable books I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Separation and Grief

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure locations – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a picture: in the background, a plant was burning, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods passed over the city like weather: swift fear, anxiety, righteous anger at the unfairness, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and references that the work demands.

Outside, blast waves ripped windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every pane was destroyed, the furniture lay broken, personal effects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an stand, refusing to let silence and debris have the final say.

Translating Grief

A photograph circulated digitally of a young writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly next to her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an elderly woman running between alleyways, yelling a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some buried recollection. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: transforming destruction into image, demise into verse, grief into longing.

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst ruin, I found myself working on a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet kept producing until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all longed for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth pursuing.

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

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his confinement, asking for more books, insisting that linguistic work become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, aspiration, rigor, support, and metaphor” all at once.

A Scarred Voice

And then came the picture. I noticed it on a website and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, damaged but intact, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, stripped of life among the rubble and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but persisting.

I looked at 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 bombardment, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else disappears. It is a subtle, determined rejection to disappear.