Amid those Devastated Remains of an Residential Building, I Found a Volume I’d Translated

Within the debris of a collapsed building, a single vision remained with me: a book I had converted from English to Persian, lying partly concealed in dirt and ash. Its front was ripped and smudged, its pages curled and burned, but it was still legible. Still communicating.

A Metropolis During Bombardment

Two days prior, missiles began striking the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, powerful detonations. The web was completely severed. I was in my flat, working on a text about what it means to transport language across tongues, and the morals and anxieties of occupying someone else's perspective. As edifices came down, I sat polishing a text that argued, in its subtle way, for the persistence of significance.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publisher had been about to go to print was halted when the printing house ceased operations. Bookstores closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the bookshelves in my apartment, filled with lexicons, rare books I had spent years accumulating 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 less dangerous locations – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a plant was on fire, black smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like a front: swift fear, apprehension, moral outrage at the wrong, then detachment. Beyond the personal impact, the attack destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and references that translation demands.

Outside, blast waves blew windows from their sashes; at a family member's house, every window was destroyed, the possessions lay damaged, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, creating at an easel, refusing to let silence and dust have the ultimate victory.

Transforming Sorrow

A image circulated online of a young artist who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an aged woman running between alleys, yelling a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried memory. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

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

The Work as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by ruin, I found myself rendering a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet kept creating until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward.

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

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his prison cell, asking for more resources, insisting that language study become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, aspiration, rigor, support, and metaphor” all at once.

A Marked Legacy

And then came the image. I noticed it on a news site and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, marked but surviving, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been black and white, 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 visible – 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 bombardment, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a subtle, determined refusal to disappear.