Within the Bombed-Out Remains of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Book I’d Rendered

Within the wreckage of a destroyed building, a single vision remained with me: a book I had translated from the English language to Persian, sitting partly concealed in dust and ash. Its front was ripped and smudged, its sheets curled and scorched, but it was still legible. Still speaking.

An Urban Center During Attack

Two days earlier, missiles began striking the city. There were no sirens, just abrupt, forceful blasts. The web was completely severed. I was in my flat, rendering a text about what it means to transport words across tongues, and the principles and worries of taking on a different narrative. As structures collapsed, I sat editing a text that contended, in its understated way, for the persistence of purpose.

Everything halted. A project my publisher had been about to go to print was stranded when the printing house shut down. Retailers locked their doors one by one. One night, when the booms were too nearby, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the bookshelves in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, hard-to-find volumes 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 survive the night.

Dispersal and Loss

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be safer locations – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a photo: in the faraway, a industrial site was on fire, dark smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to chase them.

During those days, feelings moved through the city like weather: swift fear, anxiety, moral outrage at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the psychological cost, the bombardment destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant look-ups and references that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces blew windows from their sashes; at a family member's house, every pane was shattered, the possessions lay damaged, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an stand, choosing not to let stillness and debris have the last word.

Translating Sorrow

A picture circulated digitally of a young artist who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman dashing between passages, calling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some repressed memory. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: transforming ruin into image, loss into verse, sorrow into quest.

The Work as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself rendering a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet continued working until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all longed for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than an art form: it was an act of resistance, of staying put, of persisting.

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

A Scarred Voice

And then came the photograph. I noticed it on a website and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, scarred but surviving, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, devoid of life among the rubble and debris. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – 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 complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else falls away. It is a persistent, unyielding rejection to be silenced.