Within the Bombed-Out Remains of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Volume I Had Rendered

Among the rubble of a fallen building, a particular image lingered with me: a book I had rendered from the English language to Persian, resting partially covered in dust and soot. Its front was shredded and stained, its leaves curled and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking.

An Urban Center Under Attack

Two days before, missiles started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, forceful blasts. The digital network was completely severed. I was in my apartment, rendering a book about what it means to carry language across languages, and the ethics and anxieties of taking on another’s perspective. As edifices came down, I sat editing a text that argued, in its subtle way, for the endurance of purpose.

Everything stopped. A project my publishing house had been about to send to press was stranded when the printing house shut down. Bookstores locked their doors one by one. One night, when the booms were too close, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop worrying about the library in my apartment, filled with reference books, valuable volumes I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Separation and Devastation

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be safer towns – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a photo: in the background, a plant was burning, thick smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly somewhere else, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods moved through the city like a storm: instant dread, anxiety, righteous anger at the unfairness, then detachment. Beyond the emotional toll, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick queries and sources that translation demands.

Outside, blast waves blew windows from their frames; at a relative's house, every pane was broken, the belongings lay ruined, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an stand, declining to let silence and dust have the last word.

Translating Sorrow

A photograph was shared online of a 23-year-old artist who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went viral with her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an older woman running between passages, yelling a name. People said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: transforming ruin into image, death into verse, grief into search.

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of destruction, I found myself translating a fable about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet persisted creating until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth pursuing.

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

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

A Scarred Legacy

And then came the photograph. I noticed it on a news site and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, marked but whole, my name shown 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 wreckage. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – 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 attack, was to say: “this voice mattered”. 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 be silenced.