Among the Ruined Remains of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Volume I’d Rendered

Among the rubble of a fallen apartment block, a particular sight lingered with me: a book I had translated from English to Persian, lying partly concealed in dirt and ash. Its jacket was ripped and dirtied, its leaves curled and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating.

A City During Assault

Two days before, missiles started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just sudden, powerful blasts. The internet was completely severed. I was in my apartment, rendering a book about what it means to carry text across cultures, and the ethics and concerns of inhabiting someone else's narrative. As buildings fell, I sat editing a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything ceased. A book my publishing house had been about to go to print was stranded when the printing house closed. Bookstores shut one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, filled with dictionaries, rare volumes I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Dispersal and Grief

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous locations – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a picture: in the distance, a factory was ablaze, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and peril seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods passed over the city like a front: instant dread, anxiety, righteous anger at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and references that translation demands.

Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every pane was broken, the possessions lay ruined, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, painting at an stand, refusing to let stillness and dust have the ultimate victory.

Transforming Sorrow

A photograph spread online of a 23-year-old artist who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her poem went viral with her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman running between alleys, shouting a name. People said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some repressed memory. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: changing devastation into picture, demise into lines, sorrow into quest.

The Work as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst destruction, I found myself working on a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet persisted working until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all longed for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond a skill: it was an act of perseverance, of remaining, of persisting.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his confinement, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that translation become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, hope, practice, anchor, and symbol” all at once.

A Scarred Legacy

And then came the image. I noticed it on a news site and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, scarred but surviving, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, stripped 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 apparent – scarred, but surviving.

I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a political act”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, unyielding refusal to vanish.