Amid the Ruined Debris of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Book I’d Rendered

In the wreckage of a collapsed structure, a particular image remained with me: a book I had rendered from English to Persian, lying half-buried in dust and soot. Its jacket was shredded and stained, its pages curled and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still uttering words.

A Metropolis Amid Attack

Two days before, projectiles started hitting the city. There were no sirens, just abrupt, forceful detonations. The web was completely disconnected. I was in my residence, working on a text about what it means to transport language across tongues, and the principles and concerns of inhabiting someone else's narrative. As edifices collapsed, I sat editing a text that contended, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything halted. A manuscript my publisher had been about to send to press was stuck when the printer ceased operations. Shops closed one by one. One night, when the booms were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the library in my apartment, filled with dictionaries, rare volumes I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That library was my lifework, 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 less dangerous locations – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a picture: in the faraway, a factory was on fire, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions moved through the city like weather: sudden terror, anxiety, moral outrage at the unfairness, then apathy. 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 work demands.

Outside, blast waves tore windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every window was destroyed, the possessions lay broken, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, painting at an easel, declining to let stillness and debris have the last word.

Translating Grief

A picture was shared digitally of a 23-year-old poet 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 elderly woman hurrying between passages, yelling a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some deep-seated remembrance. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: changing ruin into image, loss into lines, sorrow into longing.

The Work as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself working on a story for young readers 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 lost his sight yet continued producing until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all yearned for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth reaching toward.

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

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a prison; 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 “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, hope, practice, foundation, and symbol” all at once.

A Marked Legacy

And then came the photograph. I noticed it on a website and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, marked but surviving, 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 ruins. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – 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 true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, unyielding rejection to vanish.