Within the Devastated Remains of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Book I’d Rendered

Among the rubble of a collapsed apartment block, a single image remained with me: a book I had converted from the English language to Farsi, sitting half-buried in dirt and soot. Its jacket was ripped and stained, its sheets bent and scorched, but it was still readable. Still speaking.

An Urban Center During Bombardment

Two days prior, missiles started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, violent detonations. The web was completely severed. I was in my residence, translating a text about what it means to transport text across tongues, and the morals and concerns of taking on someone else's narrative. As buildings fell, I sat editing a text that contended, in its subtle way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything stopped. A project my publishing house had been about to send to press was halted when the printer ceased operations. Retailers shut 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 thinking about the shelves in my apartment, filled with reference books, valuable volumes I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive 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 hit. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a industrial site was ablaze, thick smoke spiraling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly somewhere else, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, emotions passed over the city like a storm: instant terror, anxiety, righteous anger at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the emotional toll, the attack destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick queries and sources that the craft demands.

Outside, blast waves blew windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the belongings lay damaged, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an stand, refusing to let silence and dirt have the last word.

Transforming Grief

A photograph spread online of a 23-year-old poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her poem went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman dashing between passages, calling a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried recollection. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: turning devastation into picture, death into poetry, grief into quest.

Translation as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself rendering a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet kept producing until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all desired – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than an art form: it was an act of resistance, of holding one's ground, of persisting.

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

A Scarred Legacy

And then came the photograph. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, scarred but surviving, my name printed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, drained of life among the concrete and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – 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 full weight of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, determined refusal to be silenced.