Amid those Bombed-Out Remains of an Residential Building, I Found a Volume I’d Rendered

Among the debris of a destroyed apartment block, a particular image stayed with me: a tome I had translated from the English language to Persian, resting partly concealed in dust and soot. Its jacket was shredded and dirtied, its leaves bent and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating.

A City Under Attack

Two days before, projectiles began striking the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, forceful explosions. The digital network was entirely disconnected. I was in my flat, rendering a work about what it means to move language across cultures, and the principles and worries of taking on someone else's voice. As edifices came down, I sat editing a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything ceased. A manuscript my publisher had been about to publish was stranded when the printer shut down. Shops locked their doors one by one. One night, when the explosions 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 reference books, valuable editions I had spent years accumulating 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.

Dispersal and Devastation

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be safer areas – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a image: in the background, a factory was on fire, thick smoke coiling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods moved through the city like weather: instant fear, unease, righteous anger at the unfairness, then numbness. Beyond the psychological cost, the bombardment destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and materials that translation demands.

Outside, concussive forces ripped windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every pane was shattered, the belongings lay damaged, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, creating at an stand, declining to let silence and dirt have the ultimate victory.

Translating Pain

A picture was shared online of a young writer who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared next to her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman hurrying between alleyways, shouting a name. People said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some buried recollection. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: turning destruction into art, death into lines, sorrow into longing.

The Craft as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of destruction, I found myself rendering a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet continued working until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unattainable. 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 greater than a skill: it was an act of defiance, of remaining, of persisting.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his prison cell, asking for more resources, insisting that translation become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, goal, practice, foundation, and analogy” all at once.

A Scarred Legacy

And then came the picture. I spotted it on a platform and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, damaged but surviving, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, 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 seen – scarred, but persisting.

I stared at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a act with consequences”, but I had never felt the full weight of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else falls away. It is a persistent, unyielding declination to disappear.