Within the Devastated Debris of an Residential Building, I Saw a Book I’d Rendered

In the rubble of a collapsed apartment block, a particular image remained with me: a volume I had rendered from English to Farsi, sitting partly concealed in dust and ash. Its cover was ripped and smudged, its pages bent and singed, but it was still readable. Still uttering words.

A City Amid Assault

Two days before, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just sudden, powerful blasts. The web was completely cut off. I was in my apartment, working on a work about what it means to carry text across tongues, and the morals and anxieties of inhabiting a different narrative. As buildings came down, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything stopped. A book my publishing house had been about to send to press was halted when the printer shut down. Retailers shut one by one. One night, when the booms were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the shelves in my apartment, holding reference books, rare editions I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That library was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Distance and Devastation

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous areas – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a plant was ablaze, thick smoke curling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and danger seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions passed over the city like weather: instant fear, anxiety, indignation at the injustice, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick searches and sources that the craft demands.

Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their sashes; at a relative's house, every window was broken, the possessions lay broken, 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 dirt have the final say.

Translating Sorrow

A picture was shared digitally of a 23-year-old poet who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an older woman dashing between passages, yelling a name. People said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some repressed remembrance. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: transforming ruin into picture, death into verse, grief into longing.

The Craft as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still amidst ruin, I found myself working on a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted working 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 impossible, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond an art form: it was an act of resistance, of holding one's ground, 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 cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that linguistic work become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, hope, discipline, anchor, and analogy” all at once.

An Enduring Legacy

And then came the picture. I saw it on a website and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, marked but whole, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, stripped of life among the rubble and ruins. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but surviving.

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 true gravity 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 endure when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, determined refusal to be silenced.