Within the Devastated Remains of an Residential Building, I Found a Book I’d Rendered

Within the wreckage of a fallen building, a particular image remained with me: a tome I had translated from the English language to Persian, resting half-buried in dirt and ash. Its cover was torn and dirtied, its pages curled and singed, but it was still readable. Still uttering words.

A Metropolis Under Attack

Two days earlier, projectiles started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, forceful blasts. The digital network was completely severed. I was in my flat, working on a work about what it means to carry language across tongues, and the ethics and anxieties of inhabiting a different perspective. As buildings fell, I sat polishing a text that contended, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of significance.

Everything ceased. A project my publisher had been about to send to press was stuck when the facility closed. Shops shut one by one. One night, when the booms were too close, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, stocked with lexicons, rare volumes I had spent years accumulating 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 survive the night.

Dispersal and Grief

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure locations – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a picture: in the distance, a factory was burning, black smoke coiling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to chase them.

During those days, moods moved through the city like a front: sudden fear, anxiety, indignation at the injustice, then detachment. Beyond the emotional toll, the attack eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant look-ups and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, shockwaves ripped windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the furniture lay damaged, objects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an easel, refusing to let silence and debris have the ultimate victory.

Transforming Grief

A photograph circulated online of a 23-year-old writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her poem went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an elderly woman running between passages, yelling a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some buried memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: changing destruction into picture, demise into verse, grief into quest.

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst devastation, I found myself working on a story for young readers 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 lost his sight yet persisted working until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all yearned for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than literary craft: it was an act of resistance, of staying put, of enduring.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his cell, asking for more books, insisting that language study become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, aspiration, rigor, anchor, and metaphor” all at once.

A Scarred Legacy

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, marked but surviving, my name printed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been devoid of color, devoid 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 visible – scarred, but enduring.

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 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 transport stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, unyielding refusal to disappear.