Amid those Ruined Remains of an Residential Building, I Saw a Volume I Had Rendered

Within the wreckage of a collapsed building, a solitary image stayed with me: a volume I had converted from English to Persian, sitting partly concealed in dirt and ash. Its front was torn and stained, its pages bent and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking.

An Urban Center Amid Attack

Two days before, projectiles began striking the city. There were no sirens, just unexpected, powerful explosions. The web was entirely cut off. I was in my residence, working on a work about what it means to move words across cultures, and the ethics and concerns of occupying someone else's perspective. As structures collapsed, I sat editing a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything ceased. A project my publisher had been about to send to press was halted when the facility closed. Shops shut one by one. One night, when the booms were too nearby, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop thinking about the bookshelves in my apartment, stocked with lexicons, valuable books I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Distance and Devastation

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be safer areas – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the distance, a plant was ablaze, black smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and peril seemed to chase them.

During those days, moods swept through the city like weather: instant fear, apprehension, moral outrage at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick searches and sources that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces blew windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every sheet of glass was destroyed, the possessions lay broken, household items scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an stand, choosing not to let stillness and dirt have the last word.

Transforming Sorrow

A image spread online of a young writer who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an elderly woman running between passages, shouting a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a war 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 converting, in our own way: turning destruction into picture, loss into lines, grief into search.

The Work as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself working on a fable about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet kept working until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all yearned for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth pursuing.

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

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 books, insisting that translation become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, hope, rigor, foundation, and analogy” all at once.

A Marked Voice

And then came the picture. I noticed it on a news site and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, damaged but surviving, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, devoid of life among the concrete and ruins. 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 was important”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, stubborn rejection to vanish.