Among those Bombed-Out Remains of an Residential Building, I Found a Volume I Had Rendered

In the wreckage of a fallen building, a solitary sight lingered with me: a volume I had converted from English to Persian, lying half-buried in dust and soot. Its jacket was ripped and dirtied, its pages curled and burned, but it was still readable. Still speaking.

A Metropolis During Assault

Two days earlier, projectiles started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just sudden, powerful explosions. The internet was entirely disconnected. I was in my flat, working on a book about what it means to move language across tongues, and the principles and anxieties of occupying someone else's narrative. As structures fell, I sat polishing a text that contended, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything halted. A project my publisher had been about to send to press was stuck when the facility ceased operations. Shops closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the shelves in my apartment, holding reference books, rare editions I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That library was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Separation and Grief

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure locations – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a image: in the distance, a plant was ablaze, thick smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions moved through the city like weather: instant fear, apprehension, indignation at the unfairness, then numbness. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and references that the work demands.

Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their casings; at a relative's house, every window was broken, the furniture lay ruined, objects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, painting at an easel, refusing to let silence and dirt have the last word.

Converting Sorrow

A photograph circulated digitally of a young poet who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared with her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an older woman running between passages, shouting a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

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

Translation as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still amidst ruin, I found myself working on a fable about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet continued creating until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all longed for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond literary craft: it was an act of perseverance, of staying put, of holding on.

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

An Enduring Voice

And then came the image. I noticed it on a platform and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, damaged but whole, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, drained of life among the debris 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 political act”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else falls away. It is a subtle, stubborn refusal to disappear.