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

In the wreckage of a collapsed structure, a particular vision lingered with me: a tome I had rendered from English to Persian, resting partly concealed in dust and ash. Its jacket was shredded and smudged, its pages bent and scorched, but it was still legible. Still uttering words.

A City During Bombardment

Two days prior, rockets began striking the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, powerful blasts. The web was entirely disconnected. I was in my flat, rendering a book about what it means to transport text across cultures, and the ethics and worries of occupying a different voice. As structures came down, I sat polishing a text that argued, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publisher had been about to publish was halted when the printing house shut down. Shops shut one by one. One night, when the booms were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop worrying about the library in my apartment, filled with lexicons, valuable editions I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Dispersal and Grief

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure towns – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a photo: in the background, a plant was burning, dark smoke spiraling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly elsewhere, and danger seemed to chase them.

During those days, moods swept through the city like weather: instant terror, anxiety, moral outrage at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the emotional toll, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick searches and materials that the work demands.

Outside, shockwaves ripped windows from their sashes; at a relative's house, every sheet of glass was destroyed, the furniture lay damaged, personal effects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, creating at an easel, refusing to let quiet and debris have the ultimate victory.

Transforming Pain

A photograph spread digitally of a young poet who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman hurrying between passages, yelling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some deep-seated remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: changing destruction into picture, loss into verse, sorrow into quest.

Translation as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of devastation, I found myself rendering a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet continued producing until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all longed for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth striving for.

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

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his prison cell, asking for more resources, insisting that linguistic work become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, goal, discipline, foundation, and metaphor” all at once.

An Enduring Voice

And then came the image. I noticed it on a news site and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, damaged but whole, 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 ruins. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – 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 attack, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else falls away. It is a persistent, determined refusal to disappear.