Among the Devastated Remains of an Residential Building, I Saw a Volume I’d Rendered

Among the debris of a collapsed apartment block, a solitary sight stayed with me: a book I had converted from the English language to Farsi, sitting half-buried in dust and soot. Its jacket was ripped and smudged, its sheets curled and burned, but it was still legible. Still speaking.

An Urban Center Amid Attack

Two days prior, missiles commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just sudden, violent detonations. The digital network was totally disconnected. I was in my flat, rendering a book about what it means to move words across tongues, and the principles and concerns of inhabiting a different perspective. As buildings came down, I sat editing a text that suggested, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of significance.

Everything stopped. A project my publisher had been about to send to press was halted when the printing house shut down. Retailers locked their doors one by one. One night, when the blasts were too nearby, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop thinking about the bookshelves in my apartment, filled with dictionaries, hard-to-find volumes I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Distance and Grief

My spouse 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 leaving, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a industrial site was ablaze, thick smoke coiling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, feelings swept through the city like a front: sudden terror, anxiety, indignation at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their casings; at a relative's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the belongings lay broken, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, creating at an stand, declining to let stillness and debris have the last word.

Converting Grief

A picture was shared online of a young artist who was died when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an older woman hurrying between passages, calling a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some repressed remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: turning ruin into image, demise into poetry, grief into search.

The Craft as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself translating a children’s tale 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 lost his sight yet persisted working until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all yearned for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth striving for.

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

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his confinement, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that language study become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, aspiration, rigor, foundation, and analogy” all at once.

An Enduring Voice

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

I stared 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 fire, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, unyielding refusal to vanish.