Within the Ruined Debris of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Book I Had Rendered

In the wreckage of a collapsed building, a solitary image lingered with me: a tome I had rendered from the English language to Farsi, sitting partly concealed in dust and ash. Its cover was ripped and dirtied, its sheets bent and scorched, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking.

A City During Assault

Two days prior, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, violent detonations. The digital network was totally disconnected. I was in my flat, working on a text about what it means to transport language across cultures, and the morals and worries of inhabiting someone else's perspective. As structures collapsed, I sat polishing a text that argued, in its subtle way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything ceased. A project my publisher had been about to send to press was stranded when the printing house shut down. Shops shut one by one. One night, when the booms were too nearby, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the bookshelves in my apartment, filled with lexicons, valuable volumes I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Separation and Devastation

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be safer 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 distance, a industrial site was on fire, black smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to chase them.

During those days, emotions passed over the city like a storm: sudden fear, anxiety, indignation at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the personal impact, 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, blast waves tore windows from their casings; at a family member's house, every window was broken, the possessions lay damaged, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, creating at an stand, declining to let stillness and dust have the final say.

Converting Pain

A picture circulated on social media of a young writer who was died 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 aged woman running between alleyways, yelling a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some deep-seated recollection. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: changing destruction into picture, loss into poetry, mourning into search.

The Craft as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst ruin, I found myself rendering a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet continued producing 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 unattainable, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond an art form: 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 political thinker in his confinement, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that linguistic work become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, hope, rigor, anchor, and metaphor” all at once.

A Marked Voice

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

I stared at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the full weight of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else falls away. It is a quiet, determined rejection to be silenced.