Among the Bombed-Out Debris of an Residential Building, I Found a Volume I Had Rendered

Within the debris of a destroyed structure, a particular vision stayed with me: a book I had translated from English to Persian, lying partially covered in dirt and ash. Its cover was shredded and smudged, its sheets curled and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating.

A Metropolis Amid Bombardment

Two days prior, missiles commenced attacking the city. There were no sirens, just abrupt, forceful explosions. The digital network was totally cut off. I was in my residence, rendering a work about what it means to carry language across tongues, and the morals and worries of inhabiting another’s perspective. As structures fell, I sat editing a text that contended, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything ceased. A project my publishing house had been about to go to print was stuck when the printer closed. Shops shut one by one. One night, when the booms were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the library in my apartment, stocked with reference books, hard-to-find volumes I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That library was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Separation and Loss

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous towns – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the background, a industrial site was ablaze, dark smoke spiraling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly somewhere else, and threat seemed to chase them.

During those days, feelings moved through the city like a front: swift dread, anxiety, righteous anger at the wrong, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick queries and references that the work demands.

Outside, blast waves ripped windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every pane was shattered, the belongings lay damaged, objects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, creating at an stand, declining to let silence and debris have the final say.

Transforming Pain

A photograph circulated on social media of a young writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went viral alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman dashing between alleyways, yelling a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some deep-seated memory. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: changing devastation into art, demise into poetry, grief into longing.

The Craft as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself rendering a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can hold 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 reaching for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all longed for – seemingly unattainable, 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 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 translation become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, goal, practice, support, and analogy” all at once.

An Enduring Work

And then came the picture. I noticed it on a website and saw that, among 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 monochrome, stripped of life among the debris and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but enduring.

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 mattered”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else falls away. It is a subtle, unyielding refusal to be silenced.