Within the Devastated Remains of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Volume I Had Rendered

Among the wreckage of a collapsed structure, a particular sight remained with me: a book I had converted from the English language to Farsi, lying half-buried in dirt and ash. Its cover was torn and stained, its pages bent and burned, but it was still readable. Still speaking.

A Metropolis Amid Attack

Two days before, missiles started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, forceful explosions. The web was completely severed. I was in my apartment, translating a book about what it means to carry text across languages, and the ethics and worries of occupying another’s narrative. As structures collapsed, I sat editing a text that contended, in its understated way, for the persistence of significance.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publisher had been about to publish was stranded when the printing house closed. Retailers closed one by one. One night, when the booms were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop thinking about the library in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, rare books I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Separation and Grief

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be safer towns – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the background, a factory was burning, dark smoke spiraling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods moved through the city like a storm: swift terror, unease, indignation at the wrong, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate searches and materials that the work demands.

Outside, concussive forces blew windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the furniture lay damaged, objects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, painting at an easel, refusing to let quiet and debris have the final say.

Converting Grief

A photograph circulated on social media of a young writer who was died when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral with her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an elderly woman running between passages, yelling a name. People said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some deep-seated recollection. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

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

Translation as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst destruction, I found myself working on a fable about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet persisted creating until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all yearned for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond an art form: it was an act of defiance, of remaining, of persisting.

One day, in bright 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 language study become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, hope, rigor, support, and metaphor” all at once.

A Scarred Work

And then came the picture. I noticed it on a platform and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, marked but surviving, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been devoid of color, 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 enduring.

I looked 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 fire, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else falls away. It is a quiet, stubborn refusal to vanish.