Within the Devastated Debris of an Residential Building, I Saw a Book I Had Translated

Among the wreckage of a destroyed building, a solitary sight stayed with me: a book I had converted from the English language to Farsi, lying half-buried in dirt and soot. Its front was shredded and dirtied, its leaves bent and scorched, but it was still readable. Still speaking.

A City Amid Assault

Two days before, rockets started hitting the city. There were no sirens, just sudden, violent explosions. The internet was entirely disconnected. I was in my apartment, rendering a book about what it means to carry words across cultures, and the morals and concerns of taking on someone else's voice. As buildings came down, I sat revising a text that contended, in its subtle way, for the endurance of purpose.

Everything stopped. A book my publishing house had been about to go to print was stranded when the facility closed. Retailers shut one by one. One night, when the booms were too nearby, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the bookshelves in my apartment, holding reference books, rare volumes I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Distance and Devastation

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be safer areas – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the background, a factory was on fire, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like a front: swift dread, apprehension, indignation at the wrong, then apathy. Beyond the emotional toll, the shelling eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces ripped windows from their frames; at a relative's house, every pane was shattered, the belongings lay broken, objects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, painting at an easel, declining to let quiet and dust have the final say.

Translating Sorrow

A image was shared on social media of a 23-year-old poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went spread rapidly alongside her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an elderly woman dashing between alleyways, yelling a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some repressed remembrance. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: turning ruin into art, loss into lines, grief into search.

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst ruin, I found myself rendering 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 profound 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 desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth striving for.

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

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 dictionaries, insisting that translation become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, hope, practice, support, and symbol” all at once.

An Enduring Legacy

And then came the photograph. I spotted 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 color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, 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 surviving.

I gazed upon 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 forgotten. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, determined rejection to be silenced.