Within those Devastated Remains of an Residential Building, I Saw a Book I’d Translated

Within the debris of a fallen structure, a single sight lingered with me: a tome I had converted from English to Farsi, resting partly concealed in dirt and ash. Its jacket was torn and dirtied, its pages bent and burned, but it was still legible. Still speaking.

An Urban Center Amid Attack

Two days before, projectiles began striking the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, violent explosions. The web was entirely cut off. I was in my residence, translating a book about what it means to transport language across cultures, and the principles and worries of occupying another’s narrative. As structures collapsed, I sat editing a text that suggested, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything stopped. A project my publishing house had been about to send to press was halted when the printer ceased operations. Retailers closed one by one. One night, when the explosions were too close, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the shelves in my apartment, holding lexicons, hard-to-find editions I had spent years accumulating 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.

Dispersal and Devastation

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous locations – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a picture: in the faraway, a factory was on fire, thick smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to pursue them.

During those days, moods passed over the city like a front: swift terror, unease, indignation at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the psychological cost, the bombardment destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick look-ups and sources that translation demands.

Outside, blast waves tore windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every window was shattered, the possessions lay broken, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, painting at an easel, declining to let stillness and debris have the final say.

Translating Grief

A photograph spread on social media of a young writer who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her verse went viral alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an aged woman running between alleys, shouting a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some repressed recollection. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: transforming ruin into image, death into verse, grief into search.

The Work as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by ruin, I found myself working on a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will recover 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 kept working until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all longed for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than an art form: it was an act of perseverance, of remaining, of holding on.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his cell, asking for more books, insisting that linguistic work become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, aspiration, discipline, foundation, and analogy” all at once.

An Enduring Work

And then came the image. I noticed it on a news site and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, damaged but whole, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, drained of life among the rubble and debris. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but persisting.

I stared at 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 mattered”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, stubborn refusal to be silenced.