Amid the Ruined Debris of an Residential Building, I Found a Book I’d Rendered

Among the wreckage of a destroyed apartment block, a solitary image stayed with me: a tome I had rendered from the English language to Persian, sitting half-buried in dust and soot. Its jacket was shredded and smudged, its leaves curled and singed, but it was still readable. Still speaking.

A Metropolis Amid Bombardment

Two days before, projectiles began striking the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, powerful detonations. The internet was completely cut off. I was in my apartment, translating a work about what it means to carry language across languages, and the principles and worries of occupying a different narrative. As structures collapsed, I sat revising a text that argued, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything halted. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to go to print was halted when the printing house shut down. Retailers locked their doors one by one. One night, when the booms were too nearby, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, holding reference books, valuable books I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Distance and Grief

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

During those days, emotions swept through the city like a storm: swift dread, unease, indignation at the unfairness, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the bombardment eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and materials that translation demands.

Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their casings; at a family member's house, every pane was shattered, the possessions lay damaged, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, painting at an stand, declining to let silence and dust have the ultimate victory.

Translating Sorrow

A picture was shared on social media of a young artist who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an older woman running between alleys, yelling a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: transforming destruction into art, death into lines, mourning into search.

Translation as Resistance

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

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater 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 philosopher in his prison cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that language study become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, hope, practice, anchor, and metaphor” all at once.

An Enduring Legacy

And then came the image. I noticed it on a website and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, damaged but surviving, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been black and white, drained of life among the concrete and ruins. For most of my career, I had been unseen, 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 political act”, but I had never felt the full weight of this until then. To translate, even under fire, 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 persist when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, unyielding declination to disappear.