Among the Devastated Debris of an Residential Building, I Found a Book I Had Translated

In the debris of a destroyed apartment block, a solitary vision remained with me: a volume I had rendered from the English language to Persian, resting partly concealed in dirt and soot. Its cover was ripped and smudged, its leaves curled and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking.

An Urban Center Under Bombardment

Two days prior, projectiles started hitting the city. There were no sirens, just sudden, powerful blasts. The web was totally disconnected. I was in my flat, rendering a book about what it means to transport text across languages, and the morals and worries of occupying another’s voice. As edifices fell, I sat revising a text that contended, in its understated way, for the persistence of meaning.

Everything ceased. A book my publisher had been about to go to print was halted when the printing house closed. Bookstores closed one by one. One night, when the booms were too nearby, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, stocked with reference books, valuable editions I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Dispersal and Devastation

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous towns – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a picture: in the background, a industrial site was burning, dark smoke spiraling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to chase them.

During those days, moods swept through the city like weather: instant terror, unease, indignation at the injustice, then apathy. Beyond the emotional toll, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces blew windows from their casings; at a relative's house, every pane was broken, the possessions lay damaged, personal effects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an easel, choosing not to let silence and debris have the final say.

Converting Grief

A photograph spread digitally of a 23-year-old poet who was died when missiles struck a building. Her poem went was widely shared with her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an older woman hurrying between alleyways, yelling a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some repressed remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: turning devastation into picture, loss into poetry, mourning into quest.

Translation as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still amidst devastation, I found myself working on a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will get better 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 persisted working until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all desired – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than literary craft: it was an act of resistance, of remaining, of persisting.

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

A Marked Work

And then came the picture. I noticed it on a website and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, marked but intact, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, stripped of life among the rubble and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, 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 act with consequences”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else disappears. It is a persistent, unyielding declination to be silenced.