Amid those Devastated Remains of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Book I Had Rendered

Within the wreckage of a destroyed building, a single vision stayed with me: a volume I had converted from English to Persian, lying partially covered in dust and soot. Its cover was shredded and dirtied, its leaves bent and singed, but it was still legible. Still communicating.

A City During Attack

Two days before, rockets commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just sudden, powerful blasts. The digital network was entirely disconnected. I was in my flat, working on a book about what it means to transport text across tongues, and the ethics and worries of occupying a different narrative. As buildings fell, I sat polishing a text that contended, in its quiet way, for the persistence of significance.

Everything ceased. A project my publishing house had been about to go to print was halted when the printer shut down. Retailers closed one by one. One night, when the explosions were too close, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, holding dictionaries, valuable editions I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That library was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Distance and Grief

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure locations – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a image: in the distance, a industrial site was on fire, black smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly somewhere else, and peril seemed to chase them.

During those days, feelings swept through the city like a storm: swift dread, apprehension, moral outrage at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the emotional toll, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate searches and sources that the work demands.

Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their sashes; at a family member's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the belongings lay ruined, objects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, creating at an stand, declining to let stillness and dirt have the last word.

Translating Pain

A photograph was shared digitally of a 23-year-old poet who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her writing went spread rapidly alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman hurrying between alleyways, calling a name. People said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some repressed 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, sorrow into search.

Translation as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by ruin, I found myself working on a children’s tale 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 persisted creating until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all yearned for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond literary craft: it was an act of resistance, of staying put, of holding on.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher 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 truth, goal, rigor, anchor, and symbol” all at once.

An Enduring Legacy

And then came the picture. I saw it on a website and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, marked but surviving, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, drained 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 surviving.

I stared at 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 obliterated. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else falls away. It is a subtle, stubborn refusal to disappear.