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

Among the debris of a destroyed structure, a solitary image lingered with me: a volume I had rendered from English to Persian, resting half-buried in dirt and ash. Its jacket was ripped and smudged, its pages bent and scorched, but it was still readable. Still speaking.

An Urban Center Amid Attack

Two days before, rockets commenced attacking the city. There were no sirens, just sudden, violent detonations. The digital network was entirely disconnected. I was in my residence, working on a text about what it means to move language across tongues, and the principles and concerns of inhabiting a different narrative. As structures came down, I sat editing a text that suggested, in its subtle way, for the persistence of purpose.

Everything halted. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to go to print was stuck when the facility ceased operations. Shops closed one by one. One night, when the explosions were too close, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the bookshelves in my apartment, filled with lexicons, rare books I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Dispersal and Grief

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous towns – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a picture: in the distance, a plant was ablaze, thick smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods swept through the city like weather: swift dread, anxiety, indignation at the wrong, then apathy. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their frames; at a relative's house, every window was broken, the possessions lay broken, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, painting at an easel, choosing not to let stillness and debris have the ultimate victory.

Translating Sorrow

A picture spread online of a young poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral alongside her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an elderly woman dashing between passages, calling a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a war 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 transforming, in our own way: changing devastation into image, loss into poetry, grief into quest.

The Work as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of ruin, I found myself translating a children’s tale 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 creating until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all yearned for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth pursuing.

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

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

A Marked 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 translations, marked but intact, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, devoid of life among the debris and debris. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but enduring.

I looked 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 fire, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else disappears. It is a subtle, determined refusal to vanish.