Amid the Bombed-Out Remains of an Residential Building, I Found a Book I Had Rendered

Within the rubble of a fallen building, a single sight stayed with me: a volume I had rendered from English to Persian, sitting partially covered in dirt and ash. Its jacket was ripped and smudged, its pages curled and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating.

An Urban Center During Assault

Two days before, rockets started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just sudden, violent detonations. The web was totally severed. I was in my residence, working on a text about what it means to carry language across languages, and the ethics and worries of occupying a different narrative. As buildings fell, I sat revising a text that contended, in its understated way, for the persistence of meaning.

Everything halted. A project my publisher had been about to go to print was stranded when the facility closed. Shops shut one by one. One night, when the booms were too nearby, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop thinking about the shelves in my apartment, stocked with lexicons, rare volumes I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my lifework, 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 more secure towns – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a picture: in the background, a plant was burning, dark smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, emotions passed over the city like a storm: swift terror, anxiety, indignation at the injustice, then apathy. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick searches and sources that translation demands.

Outside, concussive forces blew windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every window was destroyed, the possessions lay broken, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an stand, declining to let quiet and debris have the last word.

Translating Sorrow

A picture circulated online of a 23-year-old poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her poem went viral with her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an aged woman running between alleys, calling a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some repressed recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: changing devastation into image, loss into verse, grief into longing.

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst ruin, I found myself rendering a fable 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 lost his sight yet persisted creating until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all desired – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond an art form: it was an act of defiance, of remaining, of persisting.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his cell, asking for more resources, insisting that language study become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, hope, practice, support, and analogy” all at once.

An Enduring Legacy

And then came the photograph. I noticed it on a platform and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, marked but whole, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been devoid of color, devoid of life among the concrete and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but persisting.

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 complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, unyielding rejection to vanish.