Amid those Ruined Remains of an Residential Building, I Found a Book I’d Rendered

Within the rubble of a fallen structure, a solitary sight lingered with me: a volume I had translated from English to Persian, lying partly concealed in dust and soot. Its cover was shredded and dirtied, its pages bent and burned, but it was still readable. Still uttering words.

A Metropolis During Bombardment

Two days earlier, rockets began striking the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, violent blasts. The digital network was totally disconnected. I was in my residence, translating a work about what it means to move language across cultures, and the morals and concerns of taking on someone else's narrative. As buildings came down, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its quiet way, for the persistence of purpose.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publisher had been about to publish was stranded when the facility closed. Shops shut one by one. One night, when the blasts were too nearby, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop thinking about the library in my apartment, filled with lexicons, hard-to-find editions I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Distance and Grief

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure towns – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a image: in the distance, a factory was on fire, thick smoke spiraling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to chase them.

During those days, moods moved through the city like a storm: swift terror, anxiety, indignation at the unfairness, then detachment. Beyond the personal impact, the bombardment eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate queries and sources that translation demands.

Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every window was broken, the possessions lay ruined, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an stand, refusing to let stillness and dirt have the last word.

Translating Pain

A picture circulated online of a young poet who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her poem went was widely shared with her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an elderly woman running between passages, calling a name. People said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some repressed recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

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

The Craft as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself rendering a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet kept producing until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all longed for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than an art form: it was an act of defiance, of remaining, 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 resources, insisting that language study become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, aspiration, discipline, support, and symbol” all at once.

A Scarred Voice

And then came the picture. I saw it on a website and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, scarred but surviving, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, 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 act with consequences”, but I had never felt the full weight of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be erased. 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 refusal to disappear.