Within the Ruined Debris of an Residential Building, I Found a Book I Had Translated

Within the debris of a collapsed structure, a solitary image stayed with me: a book I had converted from English to Farsi, resting partially covered in dust and soot. Its front was shredded and dirtied, its pages bent and scorched, but it was still readable. Still uttering words.

An Urban Center During Assault

Two days earlier, missiles commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, powerful blasts. The digital network was entirely severed. I was in my residence, rendering a work about what it means to carry language across cultures, and the principles and anxieties of occupying someone else's narrative. As structures fell, I sat editing a text that contended, in its understated way, for the persistence of significance.

Everything halted. A book my publisher had been about to publish was stuck when the printer shut down. Retailers closed one by one. One night, when the explosions were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop thinking about the bookshelves in my apartment, holding dictionaries, valuable editions I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Dispersal and Loss

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure towns – 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 background, a industrial site was ablaze, black smoke curling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and danger seemed to chase them.

During those days, moods swept through the city like weather: swift dread, anxiety, indignation at the injustice, then apathy. Beyond the personal impact, the attack eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant look-ups and materials that translation demands.

Outside, blast waves tore windows from their casings; at a relative's house, every sheet of glass was destroyed, the possessions lay damaged, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, painting at an easel, declining to let quiet and dirt have the final say.

Transforming Sorrow

A photograph was shared online of a young writer who was died when missiles struck a building. Her poem went spread rapidly alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, 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 triggered some repressed remembrance. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: transforming destruction into picture, death into poetry, sorrow into search.

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst ruin, I found myself rendering a fable about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet kept working until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all yearned for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth reaching toward.

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

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher 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, aspiration, practice, anchor, and symbol” all at once.

A Marked Voice

And then came the photograph. I saw it on a news site and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, damaged but intact, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, drained of life among the concrete and ruins. For most of my career, I had been unseen, 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 complete significance 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 crumbles. It is a quiet, unyielding rejection to disappear.