Among the Bombed-Out Remains of an Residential Building, I Found a Book I’d Translated

Among the wreckage of a fallen building, a solitary sight stayed with me: a volume I had converted from the English language to Farsi, lying half-buried in dirt and ash. Its cover was shredded and smudged, its sheets curled and singed, but it was still readable. Still speaking.

A City Under Attack

Two days prior, rockets commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, forceful detonations. The internet was totally cut off. I was in my residence, translating a text about what it means to carry text across tongues, and the morals and worries of inhabiting a different voice. As structures came down, I sat revising a text that argued, in its quiet way, for the persistence of significance.

Everything ceased. A book my publisher had been about to go to print was stranded when the printer closed. Shops closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the library in my apartment, holding lexicons, valuable volumes I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That library was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Distance and Devastation

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be safer locations – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a industrial site was ablaze, dark smoke spiraling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and danger seemed to pursue them.

During those days, emotions moved through the city like a front: swift fear, apprehension, moral outrage at the unfairness, then detachment. Beyond the emotional toll, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate queries and references that translation demands.

Outside, blast waves blew windows from their casings; at a family member's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the possessions lay broken, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, painting at an stand, refusing to let quiet and dirt have the final say.

Converting Pain

A photograph circulated digitally of a 23-year-old writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went viral alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an elderly woman running between alleys, calling a name. People said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some deep-seated memory. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: turning ruin into image, demise into verse, grief into search.

The Work as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of ruin, I found myself translating a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet continued creating until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all longed for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth pursuing.

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

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

An Enduring Voice

And then came the image. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, amid 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 colour, but it might as well have been devoid of color, drained of life among the debris and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but persisting.

I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a act with consequences”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, unyielding declination to disappear.