Within the Devastated Remains of an Residential Building, I Found a Book I’d Rendered

Within the wreckage of a collapsed structure, a single image remained with me: a book I had rendered from the English language to Farsi, lying half-buried in dust and soot. Its jacket was torn and smudged, its pages bent and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating.

An Urban Center Amid Bombardment

Two days prior, missiles began striking the city. There were no warnings, just sudden, powerful detonations. The digital network was entirely severed. I was in my residence, working on a text about what it means to carry language across tongues, and the ethics and anxieties of inhabiting someone else's narrative. As buildings came down, I sat polishing a text that argued, in its understated way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything halted. A book my publishing house had been about to go to print was halted when the printer ceased operations. Shops locked their doors one by one. One night, when the explosions were too nearby, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop thinking about the library in my apartment, filled with reference books, valuable books I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Distance and Devastation

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure 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 image: in the faraway, a industrial site was on fire, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and peril seemed to follow them.

During those days, feelings swept through the city like a storm: swift terror, anxiety, righteous anger at the wrong, then numbness. Beyond the psychological cost, the bombardment eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate searches and sources that translation demands.

Outside, shockwaves ripped windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every pane was destroyed, the possessions lay broken, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an stand, declining to let quiet and dirt have the ultimate victory.

Transforming Sorrow

A picture was shared online of a 23-year-old writer who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her poem went was widely shared with her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an aged woman running between alleys, yelling a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some deep-seated memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: transforming ruin into picture, loss into poetry, sorrow into quest.

Translation as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself translating a fable about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted working until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all longed 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 holding one's ground, of holding on.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his prison cell, asking for more resources, insisting that language study become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, hope, practice, support, and symbol” all at once.

A Marked Voice

And then came the image. I saw it on a platform and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, damaged but intact, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, drained of life among the concrete and ruins. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but enduring.

I gazed upon 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 carry stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, determined rejection to be silenced.