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

Among the rubble of a fallen building, a particular image lingered with me: a volume I had converted from English to Farsi, lying partially covered in dust and ash. Its front was torn and dirtied, its leaves curled and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating.

A City During Bombardment

Two days before, rockets started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just sudden, violent detonations. The web was completely disconnected. I was in my apartment, rendering a book about what it means to carry words across tongues, and the ethics and concerns of occupying someone else's voice. As structures came down, I sat editing a text that argued, in its understated way, for the persistence of purpose.

Everything ceased. A book my publisher had been about to publish was halted when the printing house closed. Bookstores locked their doors one by one. One night, when the explosions were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, stocked with lexicons, valuable editions I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That library was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Separation and Loss

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous towns – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a picture: in the background, a plant was on fire, dark smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and threat seemed to pursue them.

During those days, emotions moved through the city like weather: instant dread, apprehension, indignation at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick queries and references that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their sashes; at a relative's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the possessions lay ruined, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, creating at an easel, refusing to let stillness and debris have the ultimate victory.

Transforming Sorrow

A image was shared online of a young poet who was died when missiles struck a building. Her writing went spread rapidly alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman running between passages, yelling a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some deep-seated remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

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

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself working on a fable about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted working until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all desired – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond a skill: it was an act of resistance, of remaining, of enduring.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that linguistic work become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, hope, rigor, foundation, and metaphor” all at once.

A Scarred Work

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 works, marked but surviving, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been black and white, devoid of life among the debris and ruins. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but persisting.

I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the full weight of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else falls away. It is a subtle, stubborn declination to be silenced.