Amid the Devastated Debris of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Volume I’d Rendered

In the rubble of a destroyed structure, a single sight lingered with me: a volume I had converted from English to Persian, sitting half-buried in dust and ash. Its jacket was shredded and dirtied, its pages bent and scorched, but it was still readable. Still speaking.

A Metropolis Under Assault

Two days earlier, projectiles started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, powerful detonations. The web was totally cut off. I was in my flat, translating a book about what it means to carry language across languages, and the principles and anxieties of taking on a different narrative. As structures collapsed, I sat revising a text that argued, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything halted. A book my publishing house had been about to go to print was stuck when the printing house ceased operations. Shops closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the bookshelves in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, valuable editions I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Distance and Grief

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure 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 picture: in the faraway, a factory was burning, thick smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like a front: instant terror, anxiety, indignation at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and sources that translation demands.

Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their frames; at a relative's house, every window was destroyed, the belongings lay damaged, objects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, painting at an easel, choosing not to let silence and debris have the last word.

Converting Sorrow

A image spread online of a young writer who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an elderly woman hurrying between passages, shouting a name. People said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some repressed remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

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

The Craft as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by ruin, I found myself rendering a children’s tale 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 experienced the loss of his sight yet kept producing until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all desired – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth pursuing.

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

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his confinement, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that linguistic work become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, hope, discipline, support, and analogy” all at once.

An Enduring Voice

And then came the image. I noticed it on a platform and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, scarred but intact, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, devoid of life among the concrete and debris. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but persisting.

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 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 remain when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, unyielding rejection to be silenced.