Amid those Devastated Debris of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Book I’d Translated

Among the rubble of a destroyed building, a solitary vision remained with me: a volume I had converted from English to Persian, resting partially covered in dust and soot. Its cover was shredded and dirtied, its pages bent and singed, but it was still readable. Still speaking.

A Metropolis During Bombardment

Two days before, rockets started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, violent explosions. The internet was completely severed. I was in my flat, rendering a text about what it means to transport text across cultures, and the principles and anxieties of occupying a different voice. As buildings fell, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything stopped. A book my publisher had been about to send to press was halted when the printing house closed. Shops shut one by one. One night, when the explosions 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, stocked with lexicons, valuable volumes I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Dispersal 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 went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a photo: in the background, a plant was on fire, black smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, feelings swept through the city like a front: instant fear, apprehension, indignation at the wrong, then numbness. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick searches and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their casings; at a relative's house, every window was shattered, the belongings lay damaged, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, working at an stand, declining to let stillness and dust have the final say.

Transforming Pain

A picture was shared online of a 23-year-old poet who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went viral with her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an aged woman dashing between alleys, shouting a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some deep-seated memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: changing devastation into image, death into lines, mourning into quest.

The Work as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still amidst devastation, I found myself working on a fable about a king whose daughter will heal 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 producing until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all yearned for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth striving for.

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

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his confinement, asking for more resources, insisting that translation become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, goal, practice, anchor, and symbol” all at once.

A Marked Legacy

And then came the photograph. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, scarred but intact, my name printed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been black and white, devoid of life among the rubble and debris. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but enduring.

I stared at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a act with consequences”, but I had never felt the complete significance 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 carry stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else disappears. It is a subtle, unyielding rejection to be silenced.