Among the Ruined Debris of an Residential Building, I Found a Volume I Had Translated

Among the debris of a collapsed apartment block, a solitary image stayed with me: a book I had converted from the English language to Farsi, lying partially covered in dirt and soot. Its cover was shredded and dirtied, its pages bent and scorched, but it was still legible. Still communicating.

A Metropolis During Attack

Two days earlier, rockets started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just sudden, forceful detonations. The internet was totally severed. I was in my residence, translating a book about what it means to move words across tongues, and the ethics and concerns of occupying someone else's narrative. As buildings fell, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its subtle way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything ceased. A book my publishing house had been about to publish was halted when the printer closed. Retailers closed one by one. One night, when the booms were too close, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the library in my apartment, filled with dictionaries, rare editions I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Distance and Grief

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure areas – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a picture: in the faraway, a factory was burning, black smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and danger seemed to pursue them.

During those days, moods swept through the city like a front: instant fear, apprehension, moral outrage at the wrong, then apathy. Beyond the personal impact, the attack eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick queries and materials that the work demands.

Outside, blast waves ripped windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every window was broken, the furniture lay broken, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an stand, refusing to let quiet and dust have the last word.

Converting Pain

A photograph spread digitally of a 23-year-old poet who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her verse went viral alongside her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman running between passages, yelling a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried recollection. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: changing destruction into picture, loss into verse, sorrow into longing.

Translation as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst devastation, I found myself translating a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted working until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all longed for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than literary craft: it was an act of perseverance, 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 philosopher 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, hope, practice, foundation, and symbol” all at once.

A Scarred Legacy

And then came the image. I spotted it on a platform and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, damaged but intact, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, stripped of life among the concrete and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – 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 fire, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else falls away. It is a quiet, stubborn refusal to disappear.