Among those Devastated Remains of an Residential Building, I Saw a Volume I’d Rendered

In the debris of a fallen structure, a solitary sight lingered with me: a tome I had translated from the English language to Farsi, resting partially covered in dirt and soot. Its front was shredded and smudged, its pages curled and singed, but it was still readable. Still communicating.

A City Under Bombardment

Two days earlier, projectiles started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just sudden, powerful detonations. The web was totally cut off. I was in my residence, working on a work about what it means to carry text across languages, and the morals and anxieties of inhabiting another’s voice. As edifices came down, I sat revising a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of significance.

Everything halted. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to send to press was stranded when the printer closed. Shops closed one by one. One night, when the booms were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, holding lexicons, valuable volumes I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That library was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Separation and Devastation

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure areas – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a image: in the background, a plant was ablaze, thick smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to chase them.

During those days, emotions passed over the city like a front: instant dread, anxiety, moral outrage at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and sources that the work demands.

Outside, blast waves ripped windows from their casings; at a relative's house, every window was shattered, the possessions lay broken, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, painting at an easel, choosing not to let stillness and dirt have the ultimate victory.

Transforming Grief

A image spread online of a 23-year-old writer who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went viral alongside her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an elderly woman hurrying between alleys, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some repressed recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: turning ruin into picture, death into lines, mourning into search.

The Work as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself working on a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted producing until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all yearned for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than literary craft: it was an act of defiance, of staying put, of enduring.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; 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 truth, hope, rigor, foundation, and analogy” all at once.

An Enduring Legacy

And then came the picture. I saw it on a news site and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, scarred but whole, my name printed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been devoid of color, drained 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 apparent – scarred, but surviving.

I looked at 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 bombardment, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else crumbles. It is a subtle, unyielding declination to vanish.