Among the Ruined Remains of an Residential Building, I Found a Volume I’d Translated

Within the rubble of a fallen apartment block, a single vision lingered with me: a volume I had translated from English to Persian, sitting partially covered in dust and ash. Its jacket was ripped and smudged, its sheets bent and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still uttering words.

An Urban Center Amid Assault

Two days earlier, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, violent explosions. The web was totally cut off. I was in my apartment, working on a work about what it means to move language across languages, and the ethics and worries of inhabiting someone else's perspective. As buildings collapsed, I sat revising a text that suggested, in its quiet way, for the persistence of meaning.

Everything stopped. A book my publishing house had been about to go to print was halted when the printer ceased operations. Shops closed one by one. One night, when the explosions were too close, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop worrying about the bookshelves in my apartment, holding dictionaries, hard-to-find editions I had spent years gathering 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 endure the night.

Distance and Grief

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be safer towns – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a picture: in the faraway, a factory was on fire, dark smoke curling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to pursue them.

During those days, feelings swept through the city like weather: sudden fear, unease, indignation at the unfairness, then numbness. Beyond the psychological cost, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate queries and sources that translation demands.

Outside, blast waves ripped windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was destroyed, the belongings lay ruined, objects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an stand, choosing not to let quiet and dust have the last word.

Transforming Sorrow

A picture circulated online of a young writer who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral alongside her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman running between alleyways, yelling a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some deep-seated remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: changing destruction into image, loss into verse, sorrow into search.

Translation as Defiance

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 recover only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet continued working until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all longed for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth pursuing.

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

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his prison cell, asking for more books, insisting that translation become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, hope, discipline, anchor, and symbol” all at once.

A Scarred Legacy

And then came the image. I saw it on a website and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, scarred but surviving, 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 ruins. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but persisting.

I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a political act”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else falls away. It is a persistent, determined declination to disappear.