Amid those Ruined Remains of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Book I Had Rendered

Among the rubble of a fallen building, a single vision remained with me: a volume I had converted from English to Persian, lying partially covered in dust and ash. Its jacket was shredded and stained, its leaves bent and scorched, but it was still legible. Still uttering words.

A Metropolis During Bombardment

Two days earlier, missiles commenced attacking the city. There were no sirens, just sudden, violent detonations. The internet was entirely cut off. I was in my flat, translating a book about what it means to transport words across cultures, and the morals and concerns of taking on a different narrative. As buildings collapsed, I sat revising a text that suggested, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything halted. A project my publishing house had been about to send to press was halted when the printing house shut down. Retailers shut one by one. One night, when the booms were too nearby, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop thinking about the shelves in my apartment, holding lexicons, hard-to-find volumes I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That library was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Separation and Devastation

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be safer towns – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a photo: in the background, a industrial site was burning, dark smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to pursue them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like weather: swift dread, anxiety, righteous anger at the wrong, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick queries and references that the work demands.

Outside, blast waves blew windows from their casings; at a family member's house, every window was destroyed, the furniture lay broken, objects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an stand, choosing not to let stillness and dust have the ultimate victory.

Converting Sorrow

A picture spread digitally of a young writer who was died when missiles struck a building. Her poem went was widely shared with her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman hurrying between passages, shouting a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some repressed recollection. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

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

The Work as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst ruin, I found myself working on a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet continued working until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all longed for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth striving for.

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

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a facility; 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 reality, hope, discipline, support, and symbol” all at once.

A Scarred Voice

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 translations, scarred but whole, my name printed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been black and white, stripped of life among the concrete and ruins. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but enduring.

I looked at 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 attack, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, unyielding refusal to vanish.