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

Among the wreckage of a collapsed building, a single sight stayed with me: a volume I had converted from English to Farsi, lying half-buried in dust and ash. Its jacket was ripped and dirtied, its leaves curled and singed, but it was still legible. Still communicating.

An Urban Center Amid Assault

Two days earlier, projectiles started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, violent detonations. The digital network was entirely severed. I was in my apartment, working on a work about what it means to transport language across languages, and the principles and worries of occupying another’s perspective. As structures came down, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the persistence of purpose.

Everything ceased. A book my publishing house had been about to go to print was stranded when the printer shut down. Shops locked their doors one by one. One night, when the explosions were too close, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop thinking about the library in my apartment, stocked with lexicons, hard-to-find volumes I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Distance and Devastation

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be safer locations – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the distance, a industrial site was on fire, thick smoke curling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods swept through the city like weather: instant dread, unease, indignation at the wrong, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the bombardment eradicated my ability to work. Without power 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 cousin's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the belongings lay broken, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, painting at an easel, refusing to let stillness and debris have the ultimate victory.

Converting Grief

A picture was shared on social media of a young poet who was died when missiles struck a building. Her writing went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman hurrying between alleyways, shouting a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some deep-seated memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: changing ruin into image, loss into poetry, mourning into longing.

The Craft as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself translating a fable about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet continued producing until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all desired – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than an art form: it was an act of resistance, of holding one's ground, of enduring.

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

An Enduring Work

And then came the image. I spotted it on a website and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, marked but intact, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, stripped of life among the concrete and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but persisting.

I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the full weight of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, unyielding declination to disappear.