Amid those Ruined Remains of an Residential Building, I Found a Volume I Had Translated

Among the wreckage of a collapsed structure, a particular vision lingered with me: a book I had converted from English to Persian, lying partly concealed in dirt and ash. Its front was ripped and smudged, its leaves bent and scorched, but it was still legible. Still speaking.

A City During Attack

Two days prior, projectiles began striking the city. There were no sirens, just unexpected, powerful blasts. The digital network was totally cut off. I was in my residence, working on a text about what it means to transport words across tongues, and the morals and concerns of inhabiting a different perspective. As edifices came down, I sat polishing a text that argued, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything ceased. A project my publishing house had been about to publish was stuck when the printing house ceased operations. Shops locked their doors one by one. One night, when the booms were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop thinking about the bookshelves in my apartment, filled with reference books, valuable books 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 endure the night.

Separation and Grief

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure towns – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a photo: in the background, a plant was on fire, dark smoke spiraling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and threat seemed to chase them.

During those days, emotions passed over the city like weather: sudden dread, apprehension, righteous anger at the wrong, then detachment. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and materials that the work demands.

Outside, concussive forces ripped windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the belongings lay damaged, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, working at an easel, refusing to let stillness and dirt have the final say.

Transforming Sorrow

A picture spread online of a 23-year-old artist who was died when missiles struck a building. Her poem went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman hurrying between alleyways, calling a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some deep-seated memory. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: changing devastation into picture, demise into verse, mourning into search.

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst destruction, I found myself working on a fable about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet persisted creating until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth striving for.

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

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his confinement, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that language study become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, hope, rigor, support, and metaphor” all at once.

An Enduring Legacy

And then came the photograph. I noticed it on a platform and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, scarred but whole, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been black and white, devoid of life among the debris and ruins. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but surviving.

I stared 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 forgotten. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, stubborn rejection to disappear.