Within those Devastated Debris of an Residential Building, I Found a Book I’d Rendered

Within the wreckage of a destroyed structure, a single sight stayed with me: a book I had rendered from the English language to Farsi, lying partially covered in dust and ash. Its front was ripped and dirtied, its sheets bent and burned, but it was still legible. Still communicating.

A City Amid Attack

Two days before, rockets began striking the city. There were no sirens, just unexpected, powerful blasts. The internet was completely disconnected. I was in my flat, translating a text about what it means to move language across tongues, and the ethics and worries of occupying another’s perspective. As edifices fell, I sat editing a text that argued, in its quiet way, for the persistence of purpose.

Everything halted. A book my publishing house had been about to go to print was stranded when the printer shut down. Retailers locked their doors one by one. One night, when the explosions were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, holding lexicons, rare volumes I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Dispersal and Grief

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous areas – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a picture: in the distance, a industrial site was on fire, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to follow them.

During those days, feelings swept through the city like a storm: instant dread, unease, indignation at the wrong, then detachment. Beyond the personal impact, the bombardment destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick searches and references that the work demands.

Outside, blast waves blew windows from their frames; at a relative's house, every window was broken, the furniture lay broken, objects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, working at an stand, choosing not to let quiet and dirt have the last word.

Translating Grief

A picture was shared on social media of a 23-year-old writer who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went viral alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an elderly woman dashing between passages, shouting a name. People said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried remembrance. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: turning destruction into image, death into verse, grief into quest.

The Craft as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still amidst destruction, I found myself working on a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted producing until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all longed for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond literary craft: it was an act of defiance, of remaining, of holding on.

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

A Scarred Voice

And then came the photograph. I saw it on a website and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, scarred but intact, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been devoid of color, stripped 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 true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else disappears. It is a subtle, determined refusal to disappear.