Within the Devastated Remains of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Volume I’d Translated

Among the debris of a destroyed structure, a solitary sight lingered with me: a tome I had rendered from the English language to Persian, lying half-buried in dirt and soot. Its cover was torn and smudged, its leaves bent and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating.

An Urban Center Under Attack

Two days before, missiles commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, forceful explosions. The internet was entirely severed. I was in my apartment, rendering a book about what it means to transport text across cultures, and the morals and anxieties of occupying someone else's narrative. As buildings came down, I sat revising a text that argued, in its understated way, for the endurance of purpose.

Everything halted. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to send to press was halted when the printer shut down. Retailers shut one by one. One night, when the booms were too close, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop worrying about the bookshelves in my apartment, holding reference books, hard-to-find books 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 endure the night.

Separation and Devastation

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous areas – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a image: in the background, a plant was burning, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to chase them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like a storm: swift fear, anxiety, righteous anger at the unfairness, then detachment. Beyond the emotional toll, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and references that translation demands.

Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was destroyed, the belongings lay damaged, personal effects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an easel, choosing not to let quiet and debris have the last word.

Transforming Grief

A photograph circulated on social media of a 23-year-old writer who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her poem went was widely shared with her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an elderly woman dashing between alleys, shouting a name. People said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some deep-seated remembrance. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: turning destruction into art, loss into poetry, mourning into quest.

Translation as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst devastation, I found myself rendering 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 lost his sight yet persisted working 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 out of reach, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than a skill: it was an act of defiance, of staying put, of enduring.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his prison cell, asking for more books, insisting that language study become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, hope, discipline, anchor, and metaphor” all at once.

A Scarred Voice

And then came the image. I saw it on a news site and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, marked but surviving, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, stripped 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 stared at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a political act”, but I had never felt the full weight of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, determined refusal to be silenced.