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

Among the debris of a destroyed structure, a single sight remained with me: a volume I had rendered from English to Farsi, lying half-buried in dirt and soot. Its cover was torn and dirtied, its sheets curled and singed, but it was still legible. Still speaking.

An Urban Center Under Bombardment

Two days before, projectiles began striking the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, powerful blasts. The digital network was totally severed. I was in my flat, rendering a work about what it means to transport words across cultures, and the ethics and anxieties of occupying a different voice. As edifices collapsed, I sat editing a text that contended, in its quiet way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything halted. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to publish was stranded when the printer shut down. Retailers locked their doors one by one. One night, when the booms were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the bookshelves in my apartment, filled with dictionaries, hard-to-find editions I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Separation and Loss

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be safer towns – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a photo: in the faraway, a factory was on fire, dark smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to chase them.

During those days, moods passed over the city like a storm: instant terror, apprehension, righteous anger at the unfairness, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate searches and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, blast waves tore windows from their sashes; at a relative's house, every window was destroyed, the furniture lay ruined, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an easel, choosing not to let stillness and dirt have the final say.

Translating Grief

A picture circulated digitally of a young artist who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an elderly woman running between passages, shouting a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some deep-seated memory. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: changing ruin into image, death into poetry, sorrow into longing.

The Craft as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of destruction, I found myself rendering a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet kept creating until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unattainable. 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 beyond a skill: it was an act of resistance, of remaining, of persisting.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his confinement, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that translation become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, hope, practice, foundation, and symbol” all at once.

An Enduring Work

And then came the photograph. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, scarred but intact, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, drained of life among the concrete and debris. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but enduring.

I stared 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 bombardment, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else disappears. It is a persistent, stubborn refusal to vanish.