Within the Bombed-Out Debris of an Residential Building, I Found a Book I’d Rendered

Within the wreckage of a destroyed building, a single sight lingered with me: a tome I had converted from the English language to Persian, resting partly concealed in dirt and ash. Its front was ripped and stained, its leaves curled and scorched, but it was still legible. Still communicating.

A City Amid Attack

Two days earlier, missiles began striking the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, forceful explosions. The web was completely disconnected. I was in my apartment, translating a book about what it means to transport text across languages, and the morals and concerns of inhabiting someone else's perspective. As edifices collapsed, I sat revising a text that suggested, in its quiet way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything stopped. A project my publisher had been about to publish was stuck when the facility closed. Retailers locked their doors one by one. One night, when the explosions were too imminent, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the bookshelves in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, rare books I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That library was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Dispersal and Grief

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure towns – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a photo: in the faraway, a factory was ablaze, dark smoke curling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and danger seemed to pursue them.

During those days, emotions moved through the city like a storm: swift dread, unease, righteous anger at the injustice, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and materials that translation demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their sashes; at a relative's house, every sheet of glass was destroyed, the possessions lay ruined, household items scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, painting at an easel, choosing not to let quiet and dust have the final say.

Converting Sorrow

A image was shared digitally of a 23-year-old poet who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her writing went was widely shared with her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an elderly woman dashing between passages, yelling a name. People said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some buried memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: changing ruin into picture, demise into lines, mourning into quest.

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst destruction, I found myself translating a story for young readers 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 continued creating until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond an art form: it was an act of perseverance, of staying put, of enduring.

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

A Scarred Voice

And then came the image. I noticed it on a news site and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, damaged but whole, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, stripped of life among the debris and debris. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but persisting.

I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a political act”, 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 forgotten. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else falls away. It is a persistent, stubborn rejection to disappear.