Amid the Bombed-Out Remains of an Residential Building, I Saw a Book I’d Rendered

Within the rubble of a collapsed structure, a solitary vision stayed with me: a book I had translated from the English language to Farsi, sitting partially covered in dust and ash. Its front was ripped and dirtied, its leaves bent and singed, but it was still legible. Still speaking.

An Urban Center During Bombardment

Two days prior, missiles started hitting the city. There were no sirens, just unexpected, powerful explosions. The digital network was totally severed. I was in my apartment, rendering a text about what it means to move language across tongues, and the ethics and worries of taking on another’s perspective. As structures came down, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything ceased. A manuscript my publisher had been about to publish was stranded when the printer closed. Shops shut one by one. One night, when the explosions were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop thinking about the bookshelves in my apartment, stocked with lexicons, hard-to-find volumes I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Dispersal and Devastation

My companion 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 distance, a plant was on fire, thick smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions passed over the city like a front: swift terror, anxiety, indignation at the wrong, then detachment. Beyond the personal impact, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and sources that the work demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every window was shattered, the furniture lay ruined, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, painting at an stand, refusing to let silence and debris have the last word.

Converting Grief

A image was shared digitally of a 23-year-old artist who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her writing went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an aged woman hurrying between passages, shouting a name. People said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some deep-seated remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: turning devastation into art, loss into verse, grief into search.

The Craft as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself working on a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet continued creating until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all desired – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond an art form: it was an act of resistance, of holding one's ground, of persisting.

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

An Enduring Legacy

And then came the picture. I noticed it on a website and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, marked but whole, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, drained of life among the concrete and debris. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but persisting.

I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, 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 erased. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, stubborn declination to be silenced.