Among the Devastated Debris of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Book I’d Translated

Within the debris of a collapsed building, a solitary vision stayed with me: a volume I had converted from English to Persian, lying partially covered in dust and soot. Its cover was ripped and dirtied, its sheets curled and scorched, but it was still readable. Still communicating.

A City During Bombardment

Two days earlier, missiles began striking the city. There were no sirens, just abrupt, powerful explosions. The web was totally cut off. I was in my apartment, translating a text about what it means to carry language across languages, and the morals and worries of inhabiting another’s narrative. As edifices fell, I sat revising a text that contended, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything halted. A project my publisher had been about to publish was stuck when the printing house ceased operations. Shops closed one by one. One night, when the explosions were too imminent, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop worrying about the library in my apartment, stocked with reference books, valuable books I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Separation and Grief

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be safer areas – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a photo: in the faraway, a plant was ablaze, thick smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly somewhere else, and danger seemed to follow them.

During those days, feelings swept through the city like a front: sudden dread, anxiety, indignation at the injustice, then detachment. Beyond the emotional toll, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick look-ups and materials that the craft demands.

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

Translating Grief

A picture circulated digitally of a young writer who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman dashing between alleys, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some repressed remembrance. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: transforming devastation into image, loss into verse, grief into search.

The Craft as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of ruin, 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 experienced the loss of his sight yet kept producing until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all longed for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond literary craft: it was an act of perseverance, of remaining, of holding on.

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 books, insisting that linguistic work become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, hope, practice, support, and analogy” all at once.

A Scarred Voice

And then came the image. I noticed it on a news site and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, marked but surviving, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, devoid of life among the rubble and ruins. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but surviving.

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 complete significance 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 transport stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, unyielding rejection to vanish.