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

Among the debris of a destroyed structure, a solitary vision remained with me: a book I had converted from English to Farsi, resting partially covered in dust and soot. Its cover was shredded and dirtied, its sheets bent and scorched, but it was still legible. Still communicating.

A Metropolis Under Attack

Two days earlier, rockets began striking the city. There were no sirens, just abrupt, forceful detonations. The internet was totally disconnected. I was in my apartment, working on a text about what it means to move language across tongues, and the ethics and anxieties of inhabiting a different narrative. As edifices collapsed, I sat editing a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything halted. A project my publishing house had been about to go to print was stranded when the printing house shut down. Retailers locked their doors one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, filled with dictionaries, rare books I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Separation and Loss

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure locations – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a industrial site was on fire, dark smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like a front: instant fear, anxiety, indignation at the injustice, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant look-ups and materials that the work demands.

Outside, blast waves blew windows from their sashes; at a family member's house, every window was shattered, the possessions lay ruined, objects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an stand, declining to let stillness and debris have the last word.

Translating Grief

A image spread on social media of a 23-year-old writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an elderly woman dashing between alleyways, shouting a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some buried recollection. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: transforming ruin into image, demise into poetry, sorrow into search.

The Craft as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst ruin, I found myself translating 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 experienced the loss of his sight yet continued producing until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all longed for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than a skill: it was an act of perseverance, of staying put, of holding on.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a facility; 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 fact, goal, practice, support, and metaphor” all at once.

A Marked Work

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

I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice was important”. 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, determined rejection to be silenced.