Within those Ruined Debris of an Residential Building, I Found a Volume I Had Translated

In the debris of a destroyed structure, a solitary vision remained with me: a volume I had translated from English to Farsi, lying half-buried in dust and soot. Its jacket was ripped and stained, its leaves curled and singed, but it was still readable. Still communicating.

An Urban Center During Attack

Two days prior, missiles began striking the city. There were no sirens, just abrupt, violent detonations. The digital network was totally disconnected. I was in my apartment, translating a book about what it means to move language across tongues, and the morals and anxieties of taking on someone else's narrative. As edifices collapsed, I sat revising a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the persistence of meaning.

Everything halted. A book my publisher had been about to go to print was stuck when the printer closed. Retailers closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop worrying about the bookshelves in my apartment, stocked with reference books, hard-to-find books I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Dispersal and Grief

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure areas – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a picture: in the distance, a plant was on fire, thick smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and danger seemed to chase them.

During those days, feelings moved through the city like weather: sudden dread, unease, righteous anger at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick queries and sources that the craft demands.

Outside, blast waves blew windows from their frames; at a relative's house, every pane was destroyed, the belongings lay broken, objects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, working at an easel, declining to let silence and dirt have the last word.

Translating Sorrow

A picture spread on social media of a 23-year-old writer who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an older woman running between alleyways, shouting a name. People said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some buried recollection. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: transforming destruction into picture, death into verse, mourning into search.

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst ruin, I found myself rendering a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet continued working until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all longed for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward.

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

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that language study become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, aspiration, rigor, anchor, and analogy” all at once.

A Marked Voice

And then came the photograph. I spotted it on a website and saw that, amid 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 devoid of color, devoid of life among the debris and debris. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but persisting.

I looked at 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 mattered”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else disappears. It is a subtle, stubborn rejection to vanish.