Among the Devastated Remains of an Residential Building, I Saw a Book I Had Rendered

In the wreckage of a destroyed building, a single vision stayed with me: a tome I had rendered from the English language to Farsi, sitting partially covered in dust and ash. Its cover was ripped and dirtied, its pages bent and burned, but it was still legible. Still communicating.

An Urban Center Amid Attack

Two days prior, rockets began striking the city. There were no sirens, just abrupt, powerful blasts. The web was completely severed. I was in my flat, rendering a text about what it means to transport words across tongues, and the ethics and anxieties of occupying another’s perspective. As structures came down, I sat revising a text that contended, in its quiet way, for the endurance of purpose.

Everything ceased. A project my publisher had been about to send to press was stranded when the printing house closed. Shops closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too nearby, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop thinking about the library in my apartment, holding dictionaries, valuable books 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 endure the night.

Separation and Loss

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous locations – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a picture: in the background, a factory was burning, thick smoke coiling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods moved through the city like a storm: instant terror, unease, moral outrage at the wrong, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, blast waves tore windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the furniture lay ruined, personal effects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, painting at an stand, choosing not to let quiet and dust have the last word.

Converting Grief

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

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

The Work as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by ruin, I found myself rendering 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 experienced the loss of his sight yet continued working until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all yearned for – 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 defiance, of holding one's ground, of holding on.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his prison cell, asking for more resources, insisting that translation become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, goal, rigor, anchor, and metaphor” all at once.

A Marked Voice

And then came the photograph. I noticed it on a website and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, marked but whole, my name printed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been devoid of color, stripped of life among the debris and debris. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but enduring.

I gazed upon 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 bombardment, 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 persistent, stubborn rejection to be silenced.