Amid those Bombed-Out Debris of an Residential Building, I Saw a Volume I’d Rendered

Within the rubble of a destroyed structure, a single image lingered with me: a tome I had translated from the English language to Persian, sitting partially covered in dirt and soot. Its front was shredded and stained, its pages curled and scorched, but it was still legible. Still uttering words.

A City Under Bombardment

Two days before, projectiles began striking the city. There were no alarms, just sudden, powerful explosions. The internet was entirely severed. I was in my residence, translating a book about what it means to carry words across cultures, and the principles and anxieties of taking on another’s perspective. As edifices collapsed, I sat revising a text that contended, in its subtle way, for the persistence of significance.

Everything ceased. A manuscript my publisher had been about to publish was stuck when the facility closed. Retailers shut one by one. One night, when the explosions were too imminent, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the library in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, valuable volumes I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Dispersal and Devastation

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure areas – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a image: in the distance, a factory was on fire, black smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly somewhere else, and peril seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like weather: sudden fear, anxiety, moral outrage at the unfairness, then numbness. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick queries and materials that translation demands.

Outside, shockwaves ripped windows from their casings; at a relative's house, every window was shattered, the possessions lay ruined, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, creating at an stand, refusing to let silence and dirt have the ultimate victory.

Converting Sorrow

A picture was shared digitally of a 23-year-old writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman hurrying between passages, yelling a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some deep-seated memory. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: changing destruction into picture, death into poetry, mourning into longing.

The Work as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of ruin, I found myself rendering a fable about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant 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 yearned for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth pursuing.

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

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his prison cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that language study become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, aspiration, rigor, anchor, and metaphor” all at once.

A Marked Work

And then came the image. I saw it on a website and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, marked but intact, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, devoid 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 seen – scarred, but surviving.

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 erased. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, determined rejection to disappear.