Amid those Devastated Debris of an Residential Building, I Saw a Volume I’d Rendered

Within the debris of a destroyed building, a particular image stayed with me: a book I had converted from the English language to Farsi, sitting partially covered in dust and soot. Its cover was torn and smudged, its sheets bent and scorched, but it was still readable. Still uttering words.

An Urban Center During Attack

Two days prior, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, powerful explosions. The internet was totally cut off. I was in my flat, translating a work about what it means to carry text across languages, and the morals and anxieties of inhabiting another’s narrative. As structures fell, I sat polishing a text that argued, in its understated way, for the persistence of significance.

Everything halted. A manuscript my publisher had been about to send to press was halted when the printer ceased operations. Bookstores shut one by one. One night, when the booms were too nearby, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop worrying about the bookshelves in my apartment, filled with reference books, valuable editions I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That library was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Dispersal and Grief

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous towns – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a image: in the distance, a industrial site was ablaze, black smoke coiling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to chase them.

During those days, moods moved through the city like a storm: swift dread, unease, righteous anger at the unfairness, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the attack destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick look-ups and sources that translation demands.

Outside, shockwaves ripped windows from their casings; at a relative's house, every window was broken, the furniture lay ruined, objects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, creating at an easel, refusing to let quiet and debris have the ultimate victory.

Converting Pain

A picture was shared digitally of a young writer who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an aged woman dashing between alleyways, shouting a name. People said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some deep-seated remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: changing devastation into picture, death into lines, sorrow into longing.

The Work as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself translating a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet persisted creating until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the impossible. 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 greater than literary craft: it was an act of perseverance, of remaining, of enduring.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his confinement, asking for more books, insisting that language study become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, hope, practice, support, and analogy” all at once.

A Marked Legacy

And then came the image. I saw it on a platform and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, scarred but intact, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been black and white, drained of life among the debris and debris. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but enduring.

I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a political act”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else disappears. It is a subtle, stubborn declination to vanish.