Among those Ruined Remains of an Residential Building, I Saw a Book I Had Translated

Within the debris of a fallen structure, a solitary sight stayed with me: a volume I had converted from English to Persian, lying partially covered in dust and soot. Its cover was ripped and dirtied, its leaves bent and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still uttering words.

An Urban Center During Bombardment

Two days earlier, missiles began striking the city. There were no sirens, just unexpected, violent explosions. The web was totally disconnected. I was in my flat, rendering a text about what it means to carry words across languages, and the morals and concerns of inhabiting a different perspective. As edifices collapsed, I sat revising a text that contended, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything ceased. A book my publishing house had been about to send to press was stranded when the printing house closed. Bookstores shut one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the library in my apartment, holding reference books, hard-to-find volumes I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That library was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Separation and Loss

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure areas – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a picture: in the faraway, a industrial site was burning, thick smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods moved through the city like a front: swift dread, unease, righteous anger at the unfairness, then detachment. Beyond the personal impact, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate queries and references that the craft demands.

Outside, blast waves tore windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the belongings lay broken, objects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, painting at an stand, choosing not to let quiet and dirt have the last word.

Translating Sorrow

A image spread digitally of a 23-year-old poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared with her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an elderly woman running between alleys, calling a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some buried remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: changing devastation into art, loss into poetry, mourning into longing.

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by ruin, I found myself translating a fable about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant 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 aiming at the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all longed for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond literary craft: it was an act of defiance, of staying put, of holding on.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his confinement, asking for more books, insisting that language study become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, aspiration, rigor, anchor, and analogy” all at once.

An Enduring Voice

And then came the image. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, marked but surviving, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been black and white, stripped of life among the concrete and ruins. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but enduring.

I stared at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice was important”. 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, unyielding rejection to be silenced.