Among the Ruined Debris of an Residential Building, I Found a Book I’d Rendered

Among the debris of a destroyed building, a single sight stayed with me: a book I had rendered from the English language to Persian, sitting partly concealed in dirt and ash. Its front was torn and smudged, its sheets curled and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still uttering words.

A Metropolis During Attack

Two days earlier, projectiles began striking the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, powerful blasts. The internet was totally severed. I was in my residence, translating a work about what it means to carry text across languages, and the principles and concerns of inhabiting another’s perspective. As structures collapsed, I sat polishing a text that contended, in its subtle way, for the persistence of significance.

Everything ceased. A project my publisher had been about to go to print was stuck when the printing house ceased operations. Bookstores shut one by one. One night, when the explosions were too nearby, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the library in my apartment, filled with lexicons, rare books I had spent years collecting 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.

Separation and Loss

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be safer towns – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a image: in the distance, a plant was burning, black smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and threat seemed to chase them.

During those days, feelings moved through the city like a front: instant terror, apprehension, righteous anger at the wrong, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant look-ups and materials that translation demands.

Outside, blast waves ripped windows from their frames; at a relative's house, every pane was shattered, the possessions lay damaged, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, painting at an stand, declining to let silence and dust have the last word.

Translating Grief

A image was shared on social media of a young poet who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an aged woman hurrying between alleyways, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some buried recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: changing destruction into picture, loss into poetry, sorrow into quest.

The Craft as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst devastation, I found myself translating a fable about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet continued producing until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all longed for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than an art form: it was an act of perseverance, of remaining, of enduring.

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

A Marked Legacy

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 renditions, marked but whole, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been devoid of color, drained of life among the concrete and ruins. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – 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 complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else falls away. It is a quiet, unyielding refusal to vanish.