Among those Devastated Remains of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Book I’d Translated

In the debris of a fallen structure, a solitary vision remained with me: a tome I had translated from the English language to Persian, lying partly concealed in dirt and ash. Its front was shredded and dirtied, its leaves bent and scorched, but it was still readable. Still uttering words.

A Metropolis Amid Bombardment

Two days prior, rockets commenced attacking the city. There were no sirens, just unexpected, forceful blasts. The web was totally cut off. I was in my flat, translating a text about what it means to transport words across cultures, and the principles and anxieties of taking on a different voice. As buildings came down, I sat revising a text that contended, in its understated way, for the persistence of purpose.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publisher had been about to publish was halted when the facility shut down. Bookstores shut one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the library in my apartment, holding reference books, valuable volumes I had spent years accumulating 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.

Dispersal and Devastation

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure areas – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a picture: in the faraway, a plant was burning, black smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and threat seemed to chase them.

During those days, feelings swept through the city like a front: sudden dread, unease, indignation at the wrong, then apathy. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick searches and sources that translation demands.

Outside, blast waves tore windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every pane was shattered, the belongings lay damaged, objects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an stand, choosing not to let silence and debris have the final say.

Translating Grief

A picture circulated online of a 23-year-old writer who was died when missiles struck a building. Her writing went was widely shared next to her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an elderly woman running between passages, shouting a name. People said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some deep-seated recollection. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: changing ruin into art, death into verse, sorrow into search.

The Craft as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of devastation, I found myself working on a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted working until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all yearned for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than a skill: it was an act of resistance, of holding one's ground, of enduring.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that language study become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, hope, rigor, foundation, and analogy” all at once.

A Scarred Work

And then came the picture. I saw it on a website and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, scarred but surviving, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been black and white, devoid of life among the concrete and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – 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 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 transport stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else falls away. It is a persistent, stubborn rejection to disappear.