Within those Bombed-Out Remains of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Book I Had Rendered

In the rubble of a fallen building, a particular vision remained with me: a book I had rendered from English to Farsi, resting half-buried in dust and ash. Its cover was torn and stained, its leaves curled and scorched, but it was still readable. Still speaking.

An Urban Center During Attack

Two days before, missiles started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, forceful blasts. The internet was totally cut off. I was in my residence, rendering a book about what it means to transport language across tongues, and the principles and anxieties of taking on someone else's perspective. As buildings collapsed, I sat revising a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the endurance of purpose.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publisher had been about to publish was stranded when the printer closed. Retailers 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 thinking about the library in my apartment, stocked with lexicons, valuable editions I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Separation and Grief

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure towns – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a picture: in the background, a industrial site was burning, dark smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to chase them.

During those days, feelings swept through the city like a storm: swift terror, anxiety, indignation at the injustice, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and sources that the craft demands.

Outside, blast waves blew windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the possessions lay damaged, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, working at an easel, declining to let quiet and dirt have the last word.

Converting Grief

A image was shared digitally of a young poet who was died when missiles struck a building. Her writing went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman running between passages, shouting a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some buried recollection. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: turning destruction into picture, demise into lines, grief into quest.

Translation as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by ruin, I found myself rendering a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will get better 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 aiming at the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all longed for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond literary craft: it was an act of perseverance, of holding one's ground, of persisting.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that translation become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, aspiration, rigor, foundation, and metaphor” all at once.

A Scarred Voice

And then came the image. I spotted it on a website and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, scarred but intact, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, drained of life among the debris and ruins. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but surviving.

I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else disappears. It is a persistent, determined refusal to be silenced.