Within the Bombed-Out Debris of an Residential Building, I Saw a Book I Had Rendered

Within the debris of a collapsed apartment block, a solitary vision lingered with me: a book I had converted from English to Farsi, lying partly concealed in dust and soot. Its jacket was shredded and dirtied, its leaves curled and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking.

A City Under Attack

Two days earlier, rockets started hitting the city. There were no sirens, just unexpected, violent explosions. The internet was completely disconnected. I was in my flat, translating a work about what it means to transport words across languages, and the ethics and worries of occupying someone else's narrative. As structures fell, I sat editing a text that contended, in its understated way, for the persistence of meaning.

Everything stopped. A project 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 close, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the shelves in my apartment, holding lexicons, hard-to-find volumes I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Dispersal and Devastation

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous locations – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a photo: in the background, a plant was burning, dark smoke spiraling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and threat seemed to chase them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like weather: sudden fear, apprehension, moral outrage at the unfairness, then detachment. Beyond the emotional toll, the attack destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick queries and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their casings; at a family member's house, every sheet of glass was destroyed, the possessions lay ruined, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, painting at an easel, refusing to let quiet and dust have the final say.

Converting Grief

A picture was shared digitally of a 23-year-old artist who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her poem went was widely shared with her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an aged woman hurrying between alleys, calling a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some deep-seated recollection. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: turning ruin into picture, demise into poetry, grief into search.

The Craft as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself rendering a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will recover 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 kept working until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all desired – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth pursuing.

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

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his prison cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that linguistic work become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, goal, discipline, anchor, and analogy” all at once.

An Enduring Voice

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

I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a political act”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, unyielding rejection to be silenced.