Amid the Devastated Debris of an Residential Building, I Saw a Book I’d Translated

Among the rubble of a fallen apartment block, a single image lingered with me: a book I had converted from English to Persian, sitting half-buried in dirt and ash. Its cover was torn and stained, its leaves bent and scorched, but it was still legible. Still uttering words.

A Metropolis Under Bombardment

Two days before, rockets commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, violent explosions. The internet was totally severed. I was in my flat, rendering a work about what it means to move text across tongues, and the ethics and concerns of taking on a different narrative. As structures came down, I sat revising a text that contended, in its understated way, for the persistence of significance.

Everything ceased. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to go to print was halted when the printing house ceased operations. Shops locked their doors one by one. One night, when the booms were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the library in my apartment, holding lexicons, hard-to-find volumes I had spent years gathering 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.

Separation and Loss

My partner 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 industrial site was on fire, thick smoke spiraling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to chase them.

During those days, moods passed over the city like a storm: instant fear, anxiety, righteous anger at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling eradicated 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 ripped windows from their casings; at a relative's house, every window was shattered, the possessions lay broken, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an stand, refusing to let stillness and dust have the final say.

Translating Sorrow

A photograph circulated digitally of a 23-year-old artist who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an elderly woman hurrying between passages, yelling a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried 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 lines, sorrow into search.

The Work as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst ruin, I found myself translating a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted producing until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unattainable. 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 remaining, of enduring.

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

An Enduring Work

And then came the image. I saw it on a news site and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, marked but whole, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, drained of life among the rubble and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but surviving.

I stared at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the true gravity 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 transport stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else disappears. It is a persistent, determined refusal to vanish.