Within the Devastated Remains of an Residential Building, I Found a Book I’d Rendered

Among the rubble of a fallen building, a particular sight stayed with me: a tome I had rendered from the English language to Persian, lying half-buried in dirt and ash. Its front was ripped and stained, its sheets bent and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating.

A Metropolis Amid Assault

Two days prior, missiles commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, violent detonations. The digital network was completely severed. I was in my residence, rendering a book about what it means to transport text across languages, and the morals and anxieties of taking on a different narrative. As structures collapsed, I sat revising a text that contended, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to send to press was halted when the facility shut down. Bookstores locked their doors one by one. One night, when the explosions were too imminent, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the bookshelves in my apartment, holding reference books, hard-to-find editions I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Distance and Devastation

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure locations – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a photo: in the faraway, a plant was ablaze, thick smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and threat seemed to chase them.

During those days, feelings moved through the city like a storm: instant fear, apprehension, moral outrage at the unfairness, then numbness. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and sources that the work demands.

Outside, blast waves tore windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every window was broken, the belongings lay ruined, personal effects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an stand, declining to let silence and debris have the ultimate victory.

Transforming Grief

A picture was shared on social media of a 23-year-old artist who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman dashing between alleys, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some deep-seated memory. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: transforming destruction into image, death into verse, mourning into search.

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of ruin, I found myself translating a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet continued creating until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all desired – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than literary craft: it was an act of perseverance, of remaining, of holding on.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his confinement, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that language study become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, aspiration, practice, support, and metaphor” all at once.

An Enduring Voice

And then came the picture. I saw it on a platform and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, marked but intact, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, drained of life among the concrete and wreckage. 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 complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under fire, 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 endure when everything else disappears. It is a subtle, determined rejection to disappear.