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

In the debris of a destroyed building, a solitary image stayed with me: a book I had rendered from the English language to Farsi, resting partially covered in dirt and ash. Its jacket was shredded and stained, its leaves bent and singed, but it was still readable. Still speaking.

A City Under Bombardment

Two days before, rockets commenced attacking the city. There were no sirens, just unexpected, violent detonations. The internet was entirely cut off. I was in my flat, rendering a text about what it means to transport text across tongues, and the principles and anxieties of inhabiting a different narrative. As edifices fell, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its subtle way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything ceased. A manuscript my publisher had been about to send to press was stuck when the facility ceased operations. Shops shut one by one. One night, when the explosions were too close, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the bookshelves in my apartment, holding lexicons, valuable books I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That library was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Separation and Grief

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

During those days, emotions passed over the city like weather: sudden dread, apprehension, righteous anger at the wrong, then detachment. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and sources that translation demands.

Outside, blast waves ripped windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the furniture lay broken, objects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, painting at an stand, choosing not to let quiet and debris have the final say.

Transforming Pain

A photograph spread digitally of a 23-year-old artist who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral alongside her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an older woman running between alleyways, yelling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some buried recollection. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: transforming ruin into image, demise into poetry, grief into quest.

The Work as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still amidst devastation, I found myself working on a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will heal 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 continued producing until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all yearned for – 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 holding one's ground, of holding on.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his confinement, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that language study become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, aspiration, rigor, support, and symbol” all at once.

An Enduring Voice

And then came the photograph. I saw it on a website and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, damaged but surviving, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, stripped of life among the debris and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but surviving.

I looked 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 bombardment, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else falls away. It is a persistent, unyielding declination to vanish.