Amid the Devastated Remains of an Residential Building, I Found a Volume I’d Translated

In the rubble of a collapsed building, a particular image remained with me: a volume I had translated from the English language to Persian, sitting partly concealed in dust and soot. Its cover was torn and stained, its leaves bent and singed, but it was still readable. Still speaking.

A City Amid Attack

Two days prior, missiles commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just sudden, forceful detonations. The web was totally severed. I was in my apartment, rendering a text about what it means to carry language across languages, and the principles and worries of taking on someone else's voice. As buildings collapsed, I sat revising a text that argued, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything halted. A project my publishing house had been about to publish was halted when the facility closed. Bookstores closed one by one. One night, when the explosions were too nearby, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop worrying about the bookshelves in my apartment, holding lexicons, rare books I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That library was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Dispersal and Loss

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous locations – 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 plant was on fire, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and threat seemed to chase them.

During those days, feelings swept through the city like a front: instant terror, anxiety, indignation at the unfairness, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the bombardment eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick searches and materials that translation demands.

Outside, shockwaves ripped windows from their casings; at a family member's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the furniture lay broken, objects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an stand, refusing to let quiet and debris have the ultimate victory.

Transforming Sorrow

A picture was shared digitally of a 23-year-old writer 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 older woman hurrying between passages, yelling a name. People said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some deep-seated memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: changing ruin into image, demise into verse, grief into search.

The Craft as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of devastation, I found myself translating a children’s tale 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 persisted producing until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all longed for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth striving for.

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

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his confinement, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that linguistic work become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, hope, practice, foundation, and metaphor” all at once.

An Enduring Work

And then came the image. I saw it on a news site and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, scarred but whole, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been devoid of color, devoid of life among the rubble and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, 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 had significance”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else falls away. It is a persistent, unyielding declination to be silenced.