Among those Devastated Remains of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Book I’d Rendered

Among the debris of a collapsed structure, a particular vision remained with me: a volume I had rendered from the English language to Persian, resting half-buried in dirt and ash. Its front was shredded and smudged, its leaves curled and scorched, but it was still decipherable. Still uttering words.

A Metropolis Under Assault

Two days prior, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no sirens, just abrupt, violent blasts. The web was completely severed. I was in my residence, working on a book about what it means to carry language across tongues, and the morals and worries of taking on someone else's voice. As edifices fell, I sat editing a text that argued, in its understated way, for the endurance of meaning.

Everything halted. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to send to press was stranded when the facility shut down. Bookstores closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, filled with lexicons, valuable books I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Separation and Devastation

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous areas – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a image: in the background, a industrial site was burning, dark smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like a storm: instant fear, apprehension, righteous anger at the wrong, then detachment. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and sources that translation demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their sashes; at a relative's house, every pane was broken, the furniture lay damaged, objects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, painting at an easel, choosing not to let silence and dirt have the last word.

Converting Pain

A photograph spread on social media of a 23-year-old writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an elderly woman dashing between alleyways, yelling a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some deep-seated memory. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: transforming destruction into picture, death into lines, grief into quest.

Translation as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of ruin, I found myself rendering a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet continued working until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all longed for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond a skill: it was an act of perseverance, of holding one's ground, of enduring.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his cell, asking for more books, insisting that language study become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, hope, discipline, foundation, and analogy” all at once.

An Enduring Work

And then came the photograph. I saw it on a platform and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, damaged but intact, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, stripped of life among the concrete and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, 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 act with consequences”, but I had never felt the full weight 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 haul stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else falls away. It is a quiet, unyielding declination to vanish.