Among the Ruined Remains of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Volume I Had Rendered

In the rubble of a collapsed building, a single vision lingered with me: a tome I had translated from the English language to Farsi, lying half-buried in dust and ash. Its front was ripped and dirtied, its pages bent and scorched, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking.

An Urban Center Under Attack

Two days prior, rockets commenced attacking the city. There were no sirens, just abrupt, powerful detonations. The internet was entirely disconnected. I was in my apartment, working on a work about what it means to carry text across tongues, and the morals and concerns of inhabiting another’s voice. As buildings collapsed, I sat revising a text that argued, in its subtle way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publisher had been about to go to print was halted when the printing house closed. Retailers shut one by one. One night, when the explosions were too close, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop thinking about the library in my apartment, stocked with reference books, rare volumes I had spent years gathering 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.

Separation and Devastation

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be safer areas – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a picture: in the distance, a factory was on fire, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like a front: swift terror, anxiety, indignation at the unfairness, then numbness. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and sources that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces blew windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every pane was destroyed, the furniture lay damaged, objects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, working at an stand, declining to let silence and debris have the ultimate victory.

Translating Grief

A picture circulated on social media of a 23-year-old writer who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman dashing between passages, yelling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some deep-seated recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: changing destruction into art, loss into verse, mourning into quest.

Translation as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still amidst destruction, I found myself translating a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will get better 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 working until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all yearned for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond a skill: it was an act of defiance, of remaining, of holding on.

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 books, insisting that language study become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, aspiration, practice, foundation, and analogy” all at once.

An Enduring Voice

And then came the photograph. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, marked but intact, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, drained of life among the rubble and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – 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 full weight of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, determined refusal to disappear.