Within those Ruined Debris of an Residential Building, I Found a Book I’d Rendered

Within the wreckage of a fallen apartment block, a solitary sight lingered with me: a tome I had converted from the English language to Persian, sitting half-buried in dirt and ash. Its cover was ripped and stained, its pages curled and burned, but it was still legible. Still communicating.

An Urban Center During Attack

Two days earlier, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, powerful blasts. The digital network was entirely disconnected. I was in my residence, rendering a text about what it means to move text across languages, and the ethics and concerns of inhabiting someone else's voice. As buildings collapsed, I sat revising a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything halted. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to publish was stranded when the printer closed. Bookstores locked their doors one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the library in my apartment, stocked with lexicons, valuable books I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure 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 hit. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a photo: in the faraway, a industrial site was on fire, dark smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to follow them.

During those days, feelings swept through the city like a front: instant dread, apprehension, indignation at the wrong, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant look-ups and materials that translation demands.

Outside, blast waves blew windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the furniture lay ruined, objects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an stand, refusing to let stillness and dirt have the final say.

Converting Pain

A photograph spread digitally of a 23-year-old writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman running between passages, calling a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some buried memory. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: transforming ruin into art, loss into poetry, grief into search.

The Work as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still amidst destruction, I found myself rendering a fable about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet continued working until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than an art form: it was an act of defiance, of remaining, of holding on.

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

An Enduring Voice

And then came the photograph. I noticed it on a website and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, scarred but whole, 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 wreckage. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but enduring.

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 mattered”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else disappears. It is a persistent, unyielding refusal to be silenced.