Among those Ruined Remains of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Volume I’d Rendered

In the wreckage of a fallen apartment block, a single sight lingered with me: a tome I had translated from the English language to Farsi, resting partly concealed in dirt and ash. Its jacket was shredded and dirtied, its leaves bent and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still uttering words.

A City Under Attack

Two days earlier, rockets started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just sudden, forceful explosions. The web was totally disconnected. I was in my flat, translating a work about what it means to carry language across cultures, and the ethics and concerns of occupying a different perspective. As structures collapsed, I sat polishing a text that argued, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything halted. A book my publisher had been about to go to print was stranded when the printing house closed. Bookstores closed one by one. One night, when the booms were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, stocked with lexicons, rare editions I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through 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 struck. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a picture: in the background, a factory was on fire, thick smoke coiling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly somewhere else, and threat seemed to pursue them.

During those days, moods moved through the city like a front: swift dread, anxiety, indignation at the wrong, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the bombardment eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and sources that the work demands.

Outside, concussive forces blew windows from their sashes; at a family member's house, every pane was destroyed, the belongings lay ruined, household items scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an easel, refusing to let silence and dust have the final say.

Transforming Grief

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

We were all converting, in our own way: turning devastation into image, demise into lines, mourning into quest.

The Work as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst devastation, I found myself working on a fable about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of 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 unattainable, yet still worth reaching toward.

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

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

An Enduring Work

And then came the picture. I saw it on a website and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, damaged but whole, 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 debris. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, 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 statement”, but I had never felt the full weight of this until then. To translate, even under attack, 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 persist when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, stubborn refusal to vanish.