Within those Ruined Debris of an Residential Building, I Saw a Book I’d Rendered

Among the rubble of a destroyed structure, a single vision lingered with me: a book I had translated from English to Persian, lying partly concealed in dirt and soot. Its jacket was torn and smudged, its sheets bent and singed, but it was still readable. Still speaking.

A Metropolis Amid Attack

Two days earlier, rockets started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just sudden, forceful detonations. The internet was totally severed. I was in my apartment, rendering a text about what it means to move language across cultures, and the morals and anxieties of taking on someone else's narrative. As buildings collapsed, I sat editing a text that argued, in its subtle way, for the endurance of purpose.

Everything halted. A book my publishing house had been about to send to press was stuck when the printing house closed. Retailers closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the library in my apartment, stocked with lexicons, rare books I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Separation and Grief

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be safer locations – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a picture: in the background, a industrial site was ablaze, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and danger seemed to follow them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like a front: swift fear, unease, righteous anger at the unfairness, then numbness. Beyond the emotional toll, the attack destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and sources that the work demands.

Outside, blast waves ripped windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was destroyed, the possessions lay broken, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, painting at an easel, refusing to let quiet and debris have the final say.

Transforming Grief

A image spread online of a 23-year-old artist who was died when missiles struck a building. Her poem went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman dashing between passages, shouting a name. People said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: changing ruin into image, demise into lines, sorrow into quest.

The Work as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of destruction, I found myself translating a fable about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant 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 unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all yearned for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth reaching toward.

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

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his confinement, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that linguistic work become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, hope, discipline, support, and analogy” all at once.

A Scarred Legacy

And then came the image. I noticed it on a website and saw that, amid 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 monochrome, devoid of life among the concrete and debris. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – 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 full weight of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, determined refusal to be silenced.