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

Within the rubble of a fallen structure, a particular vision stayed with me: a book I had converted from English to Farsi, sitting partially covered in dirt and ash. Its cover was torn and stained, its leaves bent and singed, but it was still legible. Still uttering words.

A Metropolis Under Bombardment

Two days prior, rockets began striking the city. There were no sirens, just unexpected, forceful blasts. The digital network was completely disconnected. I was in my residence, rendering a work about what it means to transport words across languages, and the principles and concerns of inhabiting someone else's perspective. As structures collapsed, I sat editing a text that argued, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything halted. A manuscript my publisher had been about to publish was stranded when the printing house ceased operations. Shops closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the library in my apartment, holding dictionaries, hard-to-find editions I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Distance and Grief

My spouse 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 departing, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a industrial site was ablaze, dark smoke coiling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, moods swept through the city like weather: instant dread, anxiety, moral outrage at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate queries and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, blast waves blew windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every window was broken, the possessions lay damaged, objects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an stand, declining to let silence and debris have the last word.

Translating Grief

A photograph circulated on social media of a 23-year-old poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral with her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an older woman running between alleyways, yelling a name. People said she had lost a son in a conflict 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: changing destruction into image, demise into poetry, sorrow into search.

The Craft as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of destruction, I found myself rendering a fable about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant 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 impossible. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all yearned for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth reaching toward.

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

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 linguistic work become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, aspiration, discipline, anchor, and metaphor” all at once.

A Scarred Legacy

And then came the photograph. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, scarred but whole, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, devoid of life among the debris and ruins. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but persisting.

I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a act with consequences”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, unyielding rejection to vanish.