Among those Devastated Debris of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Volume I Had Rendered

Among the debris of a collapsed apartment block, a solitary sight lingered with me: a volume I had converted from the English language to Persian, lying partly concealed in dirt and ash. Its jacket was ripped and stained, its leaves curled and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating.

A City During Bombardment

Two days prior, rockets started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just sudden, forceful explosions. The web was entirely disconnected. I was in my flat, rendering a work about what it means to move text across cultures, and the morals and concerns of taking on a different perspective. As structures collapsed, I sat editing a text that contended, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything stopped. A project my publisher had been about to go to print was stranded when the printing house ceased operations. Retailers shut one by one. One night, when the explosions were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, filled with lexicons, hard-to-find books I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Dispersal and Devastation

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous areas – 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 industrial site was burning, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to chase them.

During those days, feelings moved through the city like a storm: swift terror, unease, righteous anger at the wrong, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the bombardment destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant look-ups and sources that translation demands.

Outside, concussive forces blew windows from their casings; at a relative's house, every pane was broken, the possessions lay damaged, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, painting at an stand, refusing to let quiet and dirt have the ultimate victory.

Converting Pain

A photograph circulated digitally of a 23-year-old writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared next to her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an aged woman dashing between alleys, calling a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some deep-seated memory. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

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

The Craft as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still amidst ruin, I found myself translating a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet kept creating until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all longed for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than literary craft: it was an act of resistance, of remaining, of holding on.

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

A Marked Voice

And then came the image. I saw it on a platform and saw that, among 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 monochrome, stripped of life among the rubble and ruins. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but enduring.

I gazed upon 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 vanish.