Within those Devastated Remains of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Book I Had Translated

In the debris of a fallen apartment block, a single image stayed with me: a tome I had converted from the English language to Persian, lying half-buried in dust and ash. Its cover was shredded and stained, its pages curled and scorched, but it was still legible. Still uttering words.

An Urban Center Amid Bombardment

Two days before, missiles started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, violent blasts. The web was totally cut off. I was in my residence, translating a book about what it means to move text across cultures, and the morals and anxieties of occupying another’s perspective. As structures fell, I sat editing a text that contended, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to publish was halted when the facility closed. Bookstores shut one by one. One night, when the booms were too nearby, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the bookshelves in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, valuable editions I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That library was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Distance and Grief

My companion 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 image: in the faraway, a industrial site was on fire, thick smoke spiraling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to chase them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like weather: sudden terror, unease, indignation at the injustice, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick searches and references that the work demands.

Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every window was shattered, the belongings lay ruined, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an stand, declining to let silence and dirt have the last word.

Translating Grief

A picture spread online of a young artist who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman dashing between alleys, calling a name. People said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some buried recollection. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: transforming devastation into image, demise into lines, grief into quest.

The Craft as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of destruction, I found myself rendering a fable about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep 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 reaching for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all yearned for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than a skill: it was an act of resistance, of staying put, of persisting.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker 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 fact, goal, practice, support, and analogy” all at once.

A Scarred Voice

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

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 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 carry stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else disappears. It is a persistent, stubborn refusal to disappear.