Amid those Devastated Remains of an Residential Building, I Found a Volume I’d Rendered

Among the wreckage of a fallen building, a single image lingered with me: a volume I had rendered from English to Persian, resting partially covered in dust and ash. Its cover was shredded and stained, its leaves bent and scorched, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking.

A City Under Attack

Two days before, projectiles started hitting the city. There were no sirens, just unexpected, forceful explosions. The digital network was entirely disconnected. I was in my apartment, translating a work about what it means to move language across cultures, and the ethics and anxieties of inhabiting another’s voice. As edifices came down, I sat editing a text that contended, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything ceased. A book my publishing house had been about to send to press was stuck when the printing house closed. Bookstores closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the library in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, valuable editions I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Separation and Grief

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous locations – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a picture: in the faraway, a plant was ablaze, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to chase them.

During those days, feelings moved through the city like a front: sudden dread, apprehension, indignation at the wrong, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick look-ups and materials that the work demands.

Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their frames; at a relative's house, every sheet of glass was destroyed, the furniture lay damaged, objects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, painting at an stand, refusing to let quiet and debris have the final say.

Converting Pain

A photograph was shared digitally of a 23-year-old artist who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went spread rapidly alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman dashing between alleys, shouting a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some repressed memory. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: turning ruin into picture, demise into lines, mourning into longing.

Translation as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of devastation, I found myself rendering a fable 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 lost his sight yet continued producing until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all longed for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond a skill: it was an act of defiance, of staying put, of enduring.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his prison cell, asking for more books, insisting that linguistic work become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, goal, discipline, foundation, and symbol” all at once.

A Marked Work

And then came the photograph. I saw it on a website and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, scarred but surviving, my name printed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, stripped of life among the debris and ruins. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but enduring.

I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a act with consequences”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under fire, 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 endure when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, determined rejection to disappear.