Amid those Bombed-Out Debris of an Residential Building, I Found a Book I Had Rendered

Within the rubble of a destroyed building, a single image stayed with me: a volume I had rendered from the English language to Farsi, resting partially covered in dust and ash. Its front was ripped and dirtied, its leaves bent and singed, but it was still legible. Still speaking.

An Urban Center Amid Attack

Two days earlier, missiles began striking the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, powerful blasts. The internet was totally severed. I was in my apartment, rendering a text about what it means to move text across tongues, and the principles and worries of occupying someone else's perspective. As structures came down, I sat revising a text that contended, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything halted. A book my publisher had been about to go to print was stranded when the facility shut down. Bookstores shut one by one. One night, when the explosions were too close, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, stocked with lexicons, hard-to-find books I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Separation and Devastation

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure towns – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a picture: in the faraway, a plant was ablaze, dark smoke spiraling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and threat seemed to pursue them.

During those days, feelings swept through the city like a storm: swift terror, anxiety, indignation at the unfairness, then detachment. Beyond the emotional toll, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and sources that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their casings; at a relative's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the possessions lay ruined, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, painting at an stand, choosing not to let quiet and dust have the ultimate victory.

Converting Sorrow

A photograph circulated digitally of a young artist who was died when missiles struck a building. Her writing went was widely shared with her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an older woman dashing between passages, calling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some deep-seated remembrance. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: turning devastation into picture, death into verse, sorrow into quest.

The Work as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst destruction, I found myself working on 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 profound meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet persisted creating until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all desired – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond literary craft: it was an act of defiance, of remaining, of enduring.

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

A Marked Legacy

And then came the picture. I spotted it on a website and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, damaged but whole, my name displayed 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 visible – scarred, but enduring.

I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the complete significance 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 crumbles. It is a subtle, unyielding declination to be silenced.