Amid those Devastated Debris of an Residential Building, I Saw a Book I Had Rendered

In the wreckage of a collapsed apartment block, a particular sight stayed with me: a volume I had translated from the English language to Persian, sitting half-buried in dust and soot. Its jacket was shredded and smudged, its pages bent and scorched, but it was still readable. Still uttering words.

A Metropolis Amid Attack

Two days before, rockets started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just sudden, powerful detonations. The internet was entirely disconnected. I was in my residence, translating a book about what it means to transport language across languages, and the principles and anxieties of inhabiting someone else's voice. As edifices came down, I sat polishing a text that argued, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything halted. A project my publishing house had been about to send to press was stuck when the printing house closed. Bookstores shut one by one. One night, when the explosions were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop thinking about the bookshelves in my apartment, stocked with reference books, valuable books I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That library was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Distance and Loss

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure areas – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a picture: in the background, a plant was burning, black smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like a front: instant terror, unease, moral outrage at the unfairness, then detachment. Beyond the emotional toll, the shelling eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant look-ups and materials that translation demands.

Outside, blast waves tore windows from their casings; at a family member's house, every pane was shattered, the belongings lay ruined, objects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an stand, choosing not to let stillness and dirt have the ultimate victory.

Converting Sorrow

A picture spread digitally of a young artist who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared next to her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an elderly woman dashing between alleys, yelling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some repressed remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: transforming ruin into image, loss into verse, grief into quest.

The Craft as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of devastation, I found myself rendering a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can grasp 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 calm we all desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than a skill: it was an act of perseverance, of holding one's ground, of holding on.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that language study become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, aspiration, discipline, anchor, and symbol” all at once.

A Scarred Voice

And then came the picture. I noticed it on a website and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, scarred but whole, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, drained of life among the debris and debris. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but persisting.

I stared at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the full weight 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 quiet, unyielding rejection to vanish.