Within the Ruined Remains of an Residential Building, I Found a Volume I’d Rendered

In the wreckage of a collapsed building, a solitary vision remained with me: a book I had rendered from English to Farsi, resting partly concealed in dust and ash. Its cover was shredded and stained, its sheets bent and scorched, but it was still readable. Still uttering words.

An Urban Center Amid Attack

Two days before, rockets started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, forceful explosions. The web was completely disconnected. I was in my flat, working on a book about what it means to carry text across cultures, and the ethics and anxieties of inhabiting another’s voice. As buildings collapsed, I sat polishing a text that contended, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of significance.

Everything stopped. A project my publishing house had been about to go to print was halted when the printing house shut down. Shops locked their doors one by one. One night, when the booms were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, filled with reference books, valuable books I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Dispersal and Loss

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous towns – 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 picture: in the distance, a plant was on fire, dark smoke coiling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly somewhere else, and peril seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods swept through the city like a front: swift terror, anxiety, indignation at the wrong, then numbness. Beyond the emotional toll, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and materials that the work demands.

Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every window was broken, the possessions lay broken, objects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an easel, refusing to let stillness and dirt have the ultimate victory.

Converting Sorrow

A photograph spread online of a young writer who was died when missiles struck a building. Her writing went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an older woman hurrying between alleyways, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried remembrance. 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, mourning into longing.

Translation as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of devastation, I found myself rendering a fable about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound 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 reaching for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all desired – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than an art form: it was an act of defiance, of staying put, of holding on.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his confinement, asking for more books, insisting that translation become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, aspiration, rigor, support, and metaphor” all at once.

A Marked Work

And then came the picture. I spotted it on a website and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, damaged but intact, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, 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 seen – scarred, but surviving.

I stared at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the full weight of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, unyielding declination to disappear.