Among those Devastated Debris of an Residential Building, I Found a Book I Had Rendered

Among the wreckage of a collapsed apartment block, a particular vision stayed with me: a tome I had translated from the English language to Persian, resting half-buried in dirt and ash. Its front was torn and stained, its pages bent and singed, but it was still readable. Still communicating.

A Metropolis Amid Assault

Two days earlier, rockets commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, powerful explosions. The web was entirely disconnected. I was in my flat, translating a book about what it means to carry text across cultures, and the principles and worries of occupying someone else's narrative. As structures fell, I sat editing a text that contended, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to send to press was halted when the facility ceased operations. 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 shelter. I couldn’t stop worrying about the library in my apartment, holding reference books, valuable editions I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Distance and Grief

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be safer areas – 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 industrial site was ablaze, dark smoke spiraling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly far away, and threat seemed to pursue them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like a front: sudden dread, anxiety, righteous anger at the injustice, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and sources that the work demands.

Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every window was destroyed, the possessions lay ruined, objects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, painting at an stand, declining to let quiet and dust have the ultimate victory.

Transforming Sorrow

A image spread online of a young poet who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went viral with her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an aged woman running between alleyways, yelling a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried recollection. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: transforming devastation into picture, loss into lines, sorrow into search.

The Work as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of destruction, I found myself working on a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will get better 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 persisted creating until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all desired – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond an art form: 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 translation become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, hope, practice, anchor, and metaphor” all at once.

A Scarred Voice

And then came the photograph. I noticed it on a platform and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, damaged but surviving, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been devoid of color, stripped of life among the concrete and ruins. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but persisting.

I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else falls away. It is a persistent, determined rejection to vanish.