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

Among the rubble of a fallen apartment block, a single vision stayed with me: a tome I had rendered from the English language to Farsi, sitting half-buried in dust and soot. Its jacket was shredded and dirtied, its sheets bent and scorched, but it was still decipherable. Still uttering words.

An Urban Center Under Assault

Two days earlier, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, powerful explosions. The web was totally cut off. I was in my residence, rendering a work about what it means to carry language across languages, and the ethics and anxieties of inhabiting another’s voice. As structures fell, I sat revising a text that contended, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything halted. A project my publisher had been about to go to print was halted when the printing house closed. Shops shut one by one. One night, when the blasts were too nearby, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, stocked with lexicons, valuable volumes 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 endure the night.

Dispersal and Grief

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous locations – 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 photo: in the distance, a factory was ablaze, thick smoke spiraling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly somewhere else, and threat seemed to pursue them.

During those days, feelings swept through the city like a storm: sudden fear, apprehension, indignation at the injustice, then detachment. Beyond the personal impact, the bombardment destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and sources that translation demands.

Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their sashes; at a family member's house, every pane was broken, the belongings lay ruined, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, painting at an easel, declining to let stillness and debris have the ultimate victory.

Converting Sorrow

A image spread digitally of a young writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an older woman hurrying between passages, shouting a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some buried recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: changing destruction into art, loss into lines, mourning into longing.

The Work as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself translating a fable about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet continued creating until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unreachable. 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 a skill: it was an act of defiance, of staying put, of holding on.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his confinement, asking for more books, insisting that translation become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, goal, practice, anchor, and metaphor” all at once.

A Marked Legacy

And then came the image. I spotted it on a website and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, damaged but surviving, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, drained of life among the concrete and ruins. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but surviving.

I stared at 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 erased. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else falls away. It is a persistent, stubborn refusal to disappear.