Within those Devastated Remains of an Residential Building, I Found a Book I’d Rendered

In the wreckage of a collapsed structure, a particular sight stayed with me: a book I had rendered from the English language to Farsi, lying half-buried in dirt and soot. Its cover was ripped and smudged, its leaves bent and scorched, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating.

An Urban Center Amid Bombardment

Two days prior, rockets commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, violent blasts. The web was entirely severed. I was in my flat, working on a work about what it means to transport language across tongues, and the principles and anxieties of taking on a different perspective. As structures fell, I sat editing a text that contended, in its quiet way, for the endurance of purpose.

Everything ceased. A book my publisher had been about to go to print was stuck when the facility closed. Shops closed one by one. One night, when the explosions were too close, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, filled with lexicons, valuable volumes I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Separation and Grief

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous towns – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a picture: in the faraway, a factory was burning, black smoke coiling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to chase them.

During those days, emotions moved through the city like a storm: swift terror, apprehension, indignation at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the psychological cost, the bombardment destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick look-ups and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, blast waves ripped windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every window was broken, the furniture lay broken, objects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an easel, refusing to let quiet and debris have the ultimate victory.

Translating Grief

A image spread online of a young writer who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her poem went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman hurrying between alleyways, calling a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some deep-seated recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: transforming ruin into image, loss into verse, mourning into longing.

The Work as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still amidst destruction, I found myself rendering a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet continued working until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth striving for.

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

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 resources, insisting that language study become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, goal, practice, support, and symbol” all at once.

An Enduring Voice

And then came the photograph. I spotted it on a platform and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, scarred but whole, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, 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 stared at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else crumbles. It is a subtle, unyielding declination to disappear.