Within the Devastated Remains of an Residential Building, I Saw a Book I Had Rendered

Within the debris of a collapsed apartment block, a single sight remained with me: a tome I had rendered from the English language to Farsi, resting half-buried in dust and soot. Its front was shredded and smudged, its leaves curled and burned, but it was still readable. Still speaking.

A Metropolis Amid Attack

Two days prior, rockets started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just sudden, forceful blasts. The digital network was completely severed. I was in my flat, rendering a book about what it means to carry text across cultures, and the principles and anxieties of inhabiting a different perspective. As edifices collapsed, I sat polishing a text that contended, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything halted. A book my publisher had been about to send to press was stuck when the facility closed. Bookstores shut one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the library in my apartment, holding dictionaries, valuable editions I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That library was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Dispersal and Devastation

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure areas – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a photo: in the faraway, a plant was ablaze, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods passed over the city like a storm: sudden terror, anxiety, indignation at the wrong, then detachment. Beyond the personal impact, the bombardment eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate queries and references that translation demands.

Outside, blast waves blew windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every sheet of glass was destroyed, the furniture lay ruined, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, painting at an stand, choosing not to let quiet and dust have the final say.

Converting Pain

A photograph spread on social media of a 23-year-old artist who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral with her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an elderly woman running between passages, yelling a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some buried remembrance. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: turning devastation into art, demise into verse, sorrow into quest.

The Craft as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by ruin, I found myself translating a fable 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 producing until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all longed for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than a skill: it was an act of defiance, of staying put, of holding on.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his confinement, asking for more books, insisting that linguistic work become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, aspiration, practice, support, and symbol” all at once.

A Marked Work

And then came the photograph. I spotted it on a platform and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, scarred but intact, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, drained of life among the rubble and debris. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – 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 erased. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else falls away. It is a quiet, determined refusal to disappear.