Within those Ruined Debris of an Residential Building, I Found a Volume I’d Rendered

Within the rubble of a collapsed building, a single sight remained with me: a book I had translated from the English language to Persian, resting partially covered in dirt and soot. Its cover was ripped and smudged, its sheets bent and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking.

A City Amid Attack

Two days before, missiles commenced attacking the city. There were no sirens, just sudden, powerful explosions. The digital network was completely disconnected. I was in my apartment, rendering a book about what it means to transport words across cultures, and the principles and anxieties of occupying someone else's narrative. As structures came down, I sat editing a text that argued, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything halted. A project my publisher had been about to send to press was stuck when the facility shut down. Shops locked their doors one by one. One night, when the booms were too imminent, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, holding reference books, rare editions I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Dispersal and Loss

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous locations – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a image: in the distance, a plant was ablaze, dark smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, emotions moved through the city like a storm: instant fear, unease, indignation at the injustice, then apathy. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and references that the craft demands.

Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their casings; at a relative's house, every pane was shattered, the furniture lay broken, personal effects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, working at an easel, choosing not to let silence and dirt have the ultimate victory.

Converting Sorrow

A picture spread digitally of a 23-year-old artist who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared next to 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 conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried recollection. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

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

The Craft as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by ruin, I found myself working on a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet kept creating until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all desired – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than a skill: it was an act of defiance, of staying put, of holding on.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher 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, aspiration, practice, foundation, and symbol” all at once.

An Enduring Legacy

And then came the picture. I noticed it on a website and saw that, amid 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 color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, drained of life among the concrete and debris. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but enduring.

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 complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, determined rejection to disappear.