Amid those Ruined Debris of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Book I Had Rendered

Among the debris of a destroyed apartment block, a particular image stayed with me: a tome I had converted from English to Persian, sitting partially covered in dust and soot. Its cover was ripped and stained, its leaves bent and scorched, but it was still legible. Still uttering words.

An Urban Center Amid Assault

Two days earlier, rockets began striking the city. There were no alarms, just sudden, violent explosions. The internet was entirely severed. I was in my residence, rendering a work about what it means to transport language across languages, and the ethics and worries of inhabiting someone else's voice. As edifices collapsed, I sat revising a text that argued, in its subtle way, for the persistence of significance.

Everything stopped. A book my publisher had been about to go to print was halted when the printer closed. Bookstores closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop worrying about the library in my apartment, stocked with lexicons, valuable volumes I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Separation and Loss

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be safer towns – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the distance, a industrial site was burning, black smoke coiling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to chase them.

During those days, feelings swept through the city like a front: swift terror, apprehension, indignation at the injustice, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick look-ups and references that the work demands.

Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their casings; at a family member's house, every window was destroyed, the possessions lay damaged, personal effects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an easel, choosing not to let stillness and dirt have the ultimate victory.

Translating Pain

A image was shared online of a 23-year-old poet who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her poem went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an older woman dashing between alleyways, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some buried remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: turning destruction into picture, demise into poetry, sorrow into quest.

The Craft as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself translating a fable about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet kept working until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all yearned for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth striving for.

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

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher 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, practice, anchor, and metaphor” all at once.

An Enduring Work

And then came the picture. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, marked but whole, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, stripped of life among the concrete and ruins. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but persisting.

I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else disappears. It is a persistent, determined rejection to be silenced.