Within the Devastated Remains of an Residential Building, I Saw a Book I’d Translated

Among the debris of a fallen apartment block, a single sight lingered with me: a volume I had translated from English to Persian, resting partly concealed in dirt and ash. Its cover was ripped and smudged, its leaves bent and singed, but it was still legible. Still speaking.

An Urban Center Under Assault

Two days prior, projectiles began striking the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, powerful explosions. The internet was totally disconnected. I was in my residence, rendering a text about what it means to move words across tongues, and the principles and concerns of inhabiting another’s voice. As buildings came down, I sat revising a text that suggested, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything stopped. A project my publishing house had been about to send to press was stranded when the facility closed. Retailers locked their doors one by one. One night, when the booms were too nearby, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the bookshelves in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, hard-to-find books I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Distance and Loss

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be safer locations – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a picture: in the faraway, a industrial site was on fire, black smoke curling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to chase them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like weather: swift terror, unease, indignation at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate searches and sources that the work demands.

Outside, shockwaves ripped windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the belongings lay damaged, household items scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, painting at an easel, refusing to let stillness and dirt have the ultimate victory.

Translating Sorrow

A picture was shared online of a young writer who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went viral alongside her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman hurrying between passages, yelling a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some buried remembrance. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: turning destruction into art, loss into poetry, sorrow into search.

The Craft as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still amidst ruin, I found myself translating a fable about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet continued creating until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all longed for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than literary craft: it was an act of resistance, of holding one's ground, of persisting.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his prison cell, asking for more resources, insisting that language study become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, goal, practice, foundation, and analogy” all at once.

A Scarred Voice

And then came the picture. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, scarred but intact, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, stripped of life among the rubble and debris. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – 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 attack, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else falls away. It is a persistent, stubborn rejection to vanish.