Amid the Ruined Remains of an Residential Building, I Saw a Volume I Had Translated

Among the debris of a destroyed apartment block, a solitary sight lingered with me: a volume I had rendered from English to Persian, resting partly concealed in dirt and soot. Its jacket was torn and stained, its sheets bent and burned, but it was still readable. Still speaking.

A Metropolis During Bombardment

Two days before, missiles began striking the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, powerful explosions. The web was entirely disconnected. I was in my residence, translating a text about what it means to move text across tongues, and the ethics and concerns of inhabiting a different perspective. As structures collapsed, I sat revising a text that contended, in its subtle way, for the persistence of significance.

Everything ceased. A project my publishing house had been about to go to print was stuck when the facility ceased operations. Retailers closed one by one. One night, when the explosions were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop worrying about the library in my apartment, holding dictionaries, valuable books I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Distance and Grief

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous areas – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a photo: in the faraway, a industrial site was burning, dark smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly far away, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods moved through the city like weather: instant dread, unease, indignation at the wrong, then numbness. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate queries and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their casings; at a relative's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the belongings lay broken, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an stand, choosing not to let silence and debris have the last word.

Translating Pain

A picture was shared on social media of a 23-year-old artist who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman running between alleys, yelling a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some buried recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: changing devastation into art, loss into poetry, sorrow 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 grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet kept producing until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility 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 broad sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader 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, goal, rigor, anchor, and analogy” all at once.

A Marked Voice

And then came the image. I spotted it on a platform and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, marked but whole, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, stripped of life among the concrete and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but persisting.

I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, determined declination to vanish.