Within those Ruined Remains of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Book I Had Rendered

In the debris of a collapsed building, a particular image remained with me: a tome I had translated from the English language to Persian, resting partly concealed in dust and soot. Its cover was shredded and smudged, its leaves curled and burned, but it was still legible. Still communicating.

A Metropolis Amid Bombardment

Two days earlier, projectiles began striking the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, violent explosions. The internet was entirely cut off. I was in my flat, rendering a text about what it means to transport words across languages, and the morals and worries of taking on another’s voice. As buildings fell, I sat polishing a text that argued, in its quiet way, for the endurance of purpose.

Everything halted. A book my publisher had been about to go to print was stranded when the facility shut down. Retailers closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, filled with lexicons, valuable volumes I had spent years accumulating 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.

Dispersal and Loss

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous towns – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a image: in the background, a industrial site was on fire, dark smoke spiraling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to pursue them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like weather: sudden terror, unease, righteous anger at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate searches and references that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces blew windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every window was destroyed, the furniture lay ruined, personal effects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, working at an easel, choosing not to let stillness and dust have the final say.

Translating Pain

A photograph was shared digitally of a young writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman running between alleyways, calling a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some repressed memory. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

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

Translation as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst destruction, I found myself translating a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet persisted producing until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all longed for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond a skill: it was an act of resistance, of holding one's ground, of enduring.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that translation become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, hope, discipline, anchor, and analogy” all at once.

A Scarred Work

And then came the photograph. I saw it on a news site and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, marked but whole, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, stripped 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 enduring.

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