Amid the Bombed-Out Remains of an Residential Building, I Found a Book I’d Rendered

In the rubble of a fallen structure, a single sight lingered with me: a volume I had converted from the English language to Persian, resting half-buried in dirt and ash. Its front was ripped and dirtied, its pages bent and burned, but it was still readable. Still uttering words.

A Metropolis During Assault

Two days earlier, rockets began striking the city. There were no sirens, just abrupt, powerful detonations. The internet was entirely severed. I was in my apartment, working on a text about what it means to move language across tongues, and the morals and worries of inhabiting someone else's voice. As edifices fell, I sat polishing a text that argued, in its quiet way, for the endurance of purpose.

Everything ceased. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to send to press was stuck when the printing house shut down. Bookstores locked their doors one by one. One night, when the explosions were too close, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, holding dictionaries, valuable editions I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That library was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Dispersal and Loss

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous areas – 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 distance, a plant was burning, black smoke coiling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, feelings moved through the city like a front: instant terror, unease, moral outrage at the unfairness, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick queries and materials that the work demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their casings; at a family member's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the belongings lay damaged, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, working at an easel, refusing to let stillness and dirt have the last word.

Transforming Pain

A image circulated digitally of a 23-year-old writer who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her poem went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an elderly woman hurrying between alleyways, shouting a name. People said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some repressed remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: transforming destruction into art, demise into verse, grief into longing.

The Craft as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of destruction, I found myself working on a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet continued creating until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all yearned for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth reaching toward.

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

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

A Scarred Voice

And then came the image. I spotted it on a website and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, damaged but intact, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, drained of life among the rubble and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but surviving.

I stared at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a act with consequences”, but I had never felt the full weight of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else disappears. It is a subtle, unyielding rejection to be silenced.