Among those Devastated Remains of an Residential Building, I Found a Book I Had Translated

Within the wreckage of a collapsed structure, a solitary image remained with me: a tome I had rendered from English to Persian, lying half-buried in dust and soot. Its front was shredded and stained, its pages bent and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still uttering words.

A Metropolis Amid Bombardment

Two days before, rockets started hitting the city. There were no sirens, just unexpected, forceful explosions. The internet was entirely cut off. I was in my flat, rendering a book about what it means to carry words across cultures, and the ethics and worries of inhabiting a different perspective. As structures collapsed, I sat revising a text that suggested, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of significance.

Everything halted. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to publish was stuck when the printing house ceased operations. Shops shut one by one. One night, when the explosions were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop worrying about the bookshelves in my apartment, stocked with lexicons, rare volumes I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Distance and Loss

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous areas – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a picture: in the background, a factory was burning, thick smoke spiraling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, moods swept through the city like a front: sudden dread, unease, moral outrage at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick searches and references that translation demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every pane was broken, the possessions lay ruined, objects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, painting at an stand, declining to let stillness and dirt have the last word.

Converting Grief

A photograph was shared digitally of a young artist who was died when missiles struck a building. Her poem went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman running between passages, yelling a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some deep-seated recollection. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: changing destruction into image, loss into lines, sorrow into quest.

The Work as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of destruction, 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 profound meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet kept working until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all longed for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than an art form: it was an act of defiance, of remaining, of enduring.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his cell, asking for more resources, insisting that language study become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, aspiration, practice, foundation, and analogy” all at once.

An Enduring Work

And then came the picture. I noticed it on a platform and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, scarred but surviving, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, stripped of life among the concrete and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been invisible, 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 statement”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice had significance”. 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 quiet, determined rejection to vanish.