Within those Ruined Remains of an Residential Building, I Saw a Book I Had Rendered

Within the wreckage of a collapsed building, a single image stayed with me: a tome I had translated from the English language to Farsi, sitting partially covered in dirt and ash. Its cover was shredded and stained, its pages bent and burned, but it was still readable. Still speaking.

A Metropolis Amid Bombardment

Two days before, rockets started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, violent blasts. The digital network was completely severed. I was in my apartment, working on a book about what it means to carry words across cultures, and the morals and anxieties of taking on someone else's voice. As edifices fell, I sat editing a text that contended, in its quiet way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything ceased. A book my publisher had been about to send to press was stuck when the facility shut down. Bookstores closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop thinking about the bookshelves in my apartment, stocked with lexicons, hard-to-find editions I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Dispersal and Grief

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous towns – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a picture: in the background, a factory was ablaze, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly elsewhere, and danger seemed to pursue them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like weather: swift terror, apprehension, indignation at the unfairness, then numbness. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and sources that translation demands.

Outside, shockwaves ripped windows from their casings; at a relative's house, every window was shattered, the furniture lay damaged, household items scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, working at an stand, choosing not to let stillness and debris have the last word.

Transforming Pain

A photograph circulated online of a young artist who was died when missiles struck a building. Her poem went viral alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an older woman running 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 deep-seated recollection. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: changing devastation into image, demise into poetry, sorrow into search.

The Work as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst devastation, I found myself working on a fable about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet kept working until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all longed for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than a skill: it was an act of resistance, of remaining, of enduring.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his prison cell, asking for more books, insisting that language study become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, aspiration, rigor, anchor, and analogy” all at once.

A Marked Voice

And then came the picture. I spotted it on a website and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, damaged but intact, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, stripped of life among the rubble and debris. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but enduring.

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 bombardment, was to say: “this voice was important”. 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 persistent, determined refusal to vanish.