Among those Devastated Remains of an Residential Building, I Found a Book I Had Translated

Within the rubble of a destroyed apartment block, a solitary vision lingered with me: a tome I had rendered from the English language to Farsi, resting half-buried in dust and soot. Its cover was ripped and dirtied, its pages bent and burned, but it was still readable. Still speaking.

An Urban Center Under Assault

Two days prior, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no sirens, just sudden, powerful detonations. The digital network was completely disconnected. I was in my apartment, translating a work about what it means to carry language across languages, and the morals and worries of taking on a different perspective. As edifices fell, I sat editing a text that contended, in its understated way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything stopped. A project my publisher had been about to publish was halted when the printer shut down. Bookstores shut one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop worrying about the library in my apartment, stocked with lexicons, rare volumes I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That library was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Distance and Grief

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure towns – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a photo: in the faraway, a factory was on fire, black smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to chase them.

During those days, emotions passed over the city like a front: swift fear, unease, righteous anger at the injustice, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the bombardment eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate queries and references that the work demands.

Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the possessions lay damaged, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, creating at an easel, choosing not to let stillness and dirt have the ultimate victory.

Converting Pain

A image circulated on social media of a 23-year-old poet who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman hurrying between alleyways, shouting a name. People said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some repressed recollection. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: turning destruction into art, death into poetry, sorrow into longing.

The Work as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of destruction, I found myself working on a fable about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted producing until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all desired – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than a skill: it was an act of resistance, of holding one's ground, of holding on.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that translation become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, hope, discipline, support, and metaphor” all at once.

A Scarred Legacy

And then came the picture. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, scarred but surviving, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been devoid of color, stripped of life among the concrete and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but enduring.

I stared 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 fire, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, stubborn refusal to vanish.