Within the Devastated Debris of an Residential Building, I Found a Volume I Had Translated

In the rubble of a destroyed structure, a solitary image remained with me: a book I had rendered from English to Persian, sitting partly concealed in dust and ash. Its jacket was shredded and smudged, its leaves curled and burned, but it was still readable. Still speaking.

An Urban Center Under Attack

Two days before, projectiles started hitting the city. There were no sirens, just abrupt, forceful blasts. The web was entirely severed. I was in my flat, rendering a text about what it means to move words across tongues, and the principles and concerns of inhabiting another’s voice. As edifices came down, I sat revising a text that suggested, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything ceased. A project my publisher had been about to go to print was stuck when the printer closed. Bookstores closed one by one. One night, when the explosions were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the library in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, hard-to-find books I had spent years gathering 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.

Distance and Grief

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous locations – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a photo: in the background, a industrial site was on fire, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and peril seemed to follow them.

During those days, feelings moved through the city like a front: instant dread, apprehension, moral outrage at the unfairness, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate searches and sources that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces blew windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the furniture lay ruined, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, creating at an easel, choosing not to let quiet and dust have the final say.

Transforming Sorrow

A photograph was shared on social media of a young writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an elderly woman dashing between alleys, yelling a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some buried recollection. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: turning destruction into picture, demise into poetry, grief into quest.

The Work as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst devastation, I found myself working on a fable about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet continued creating until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all longed for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth striving for.

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

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that language study become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, hope, rigor, foundation, and symbol” all at once.

A Scarred Legacy

And then came the picture. I saw it on a platform 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 concrete and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but persisting.

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 true gravity 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 persist when everything else disappears. It is a persistent, determined rejection to be silenced.