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

In the wreckage of a destroyed structure, a solitary sight lingered with me: a tome I had rendered from the English language to Farsi, lying partly concealed in dust and ash. Its jacket was ripped and dirtied, its leaves curled and scorched, but it was still legible. Still uttering words.

An Urban Center During Attack

Two days earlier, rockets commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, violent detonations. The web was totally severed. I was in my apartment, rendering a book about what it means to transport words across cultures, and the ethics and concerns of occupying a different narrative. As edifices collapsed, I sat revising a text that suggested, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything stopped. A project my publisher had been about to send to press was stranded when the facility shut down. Bookstores closed one by one. One night, when the explosions were too nearby, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, filled with dictionaries, hard-to-find editions I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That library was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Separation 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 departing, she sent me a image: in the distance, a factory was burning, dark smoke spiraling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to chase them.

During those days, moods moved through the city like weather: sudden dread, unease, righteous anger at the injustice, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and materials that translation demands.

Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their sashes; at a relative's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the belongings lay broken, objects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, painting at an stand, refusing to let quiet and dirt have the final say.

Transforming Pain

A photograph was shared digitally of a young poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an older woman dashing between passages, yelling a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some buried remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: turning ruin into art, loss into lines, mourning into search.

The Craft as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst devastation, I found myself working on a fable about a king whose daughter will get better 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 producing until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all yearned for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth striving for.

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

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his prison cell, asking for more books, insisting that language study become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, hope, rigor, anchor, and metaphor” all at once.

An Enduring Legacy

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

I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a act with consequences”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else falls away. It is a quiet, determined refusal to disappear.