Among those Ruined Remains of an Residential Building, I Found a Book I Had Rendered

Among the rubble of a destroyed building, a single image remained with me: a book I had converted from the English language to Farsi, lying partially covered in dust and soot. Its jacket was shredded and stained, its pages curled and scorched, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating.

A City Under Assault

Two days earlier, missiles began striking the city. There were no alarms, just sudden, powerful detonations. The digital network was totally disconnected. I was in my flat, translating a text about what it means to transport words across tongues, and the principles and concerns of inhabiting someone else's voice. As edifices came down, I sat revising a text that argued, in its quiet way, for the endurance of meaning.

Everything stopped. A book my publisher had been about to publish was stranded when the printing house closed. Shops locked their doors one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the bookshelves in my apartment, holding reference books, valuable volumes I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Separation and Grief

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure towns – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a picture: in the distance, a industrial site was on fire, thick smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly somewhere else, and threat seemed to chase them.

During those days, feelings swept through the city like a front: sudden fear, unease, moral outrage at the unfairness, then detachment. Beyond the emotional toll, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick queries and sources that the work demands.

Outside, blast waves blew windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the belongings lay broken, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an stand, declining to let stillness and debris have the final say.

Converting Pain

A picture spread digitally of a young artist who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an elderly woman hurrying between alleys, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some deep-seated recollection. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

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

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by ruin, I found myself working on a fable about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound 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 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 beyond a skill: it was an act of resistance, of holding one's ground, of enduring.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his prison cell, asking for more books, insisting that linguistic work become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, goal, practice, anchor, and metaphor” all at once.

An Enduring Work

And then came the photograph. I saw it on a platform and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, scarred but surviving, my name printed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been devoid of color, devoid of life among the concrete and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – 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 true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, unyielding refusal to vanish.