Amid the Devastated Debris of an Residential Building, I Found a Book I’d Translated

Within the rubble of a fallen building, a particular sight lingered with me: a tome I had converted from the English language to Persian, lying half-buried in dirt and soot. Its jacket was ripped and smudged, its leaves bent and scorched, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking.

A City Amid Assault

Two days before, rockets commenced attacking the city. There were no sirens, just unexpected, violent explosions. The web was completely cut off. I was in my apartment, translating a work about what it means to move language across cultures, and the ethics and worries of inhabiting a different narrative. As edifices fell, I sat polishing a text that contended, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything stopped. A book my publishing house had been about to publish was halted when the printing house closed. Shops closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the library in my apartment, stocked with reference books, valuable editions I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Distance and Loss

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be safer locations – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a picture: in the background, a factory was on fire, black smoke coiling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to chase them.

During those days, moods swept through the city like a storm: instant dread, anxiety, moral outrage at the wrong, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the bombardment destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their casings; at a family member's house, every pane was destroyed, the furniture lay broken, objects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an stand, declining to let stillness and debris have the ultimate victory.

Converting Sorrow

A image spread on social media of a 23-year-old writer who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her poem went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an aged woman dashing between passages, yelling a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried remembrance. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

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

Translation as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of devastation, I found myself working on a story for young readers 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 experienced the loss of his sight yet continued producing until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all desired – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth pursuing.

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

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his cell, asking for more resources, insisting that translation become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, hope, discipline, foundation, and analogy” all at once.

A Marked Work

And then came the picture. I noticed it on a news site and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, marked but surviving, 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 concrete and debris. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but surviving.

I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, 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 obliterated. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, unyielding rejection to be silenced.