Amid the Devastated Debris of an Residential Building, I Found a Book I Had Rendered

In the debris of a fallen apartment block, a solitary vision remained with me: a tome I had rendered from the English language to Farsi, resting half-buried in dirt and ash. Its jacket was torn and smudged, its sheets curled and scorched, but it was still legible. Still uttering words.

A City During Assault

Two days earlier, missiles commenced attacking the city. There were no sirens, just unexpected, powerful explosions. The internet was totally severed. I was in my residence, rendering a book about what it means to move words across languages, and the principles and worries of occupying someone else's perspective. As edifices collapsed, I sat editing a text that argued, in its understated way, for the persistence of meaning.

Everything stopped. A project my publisher had been about to publish was stranded when the printing house closed. Shops shut one by one. One night, when the explosions were too nearby, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the bookshelves in my apartment, stocked with reference books, valuable volumes I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That library was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Distance and Grief

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be safer locations – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a photo: in the distance, a factory was ablaze, black smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly elsewhere, and danger seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions passed over the city like a front: instant terror, apprehension, indignation at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and materials that translation demands.

Outside, shockwaves ripped windows from their casings; at a family member's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the belongings lay broken, household items scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an easel, declining to let stillness and dirt have the ultimate victory.

Converting Grief

A image circulated digitally of a 23-year-old writer who was died when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an elderly woman hurrying between alleyways, calling a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some deep-seated memory. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

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

The Craft as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst devastation, I found myself working on a fable about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet persisted creating until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all longed for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than an art form: it was an act of defiance, of remaining, of enduring.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his confinement, asking for more resources, insisting that language study become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, goal, practice, support, and symbol” all at once.

A Marked Voice

And then came the image. I noticed it on a website and saw that, amid 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 colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, 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 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 true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else disappears. It is a subtle, determined declination to disappear.