Among the Devastated Remains of an Residential Building, I Found a Book I’d Translated

Within the rubble of a destroyed structure, a single image remained with me: a volume I had translated from the English language to Persian, lying partly concealed in dirt and ash. Its front was shredded and smudged, its sheets bent and scorched, but it was still readable. Still speaking.

A City Under Bombardment

Two days before, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just sudden, violent explosions. The web was totally disconnected. I was in my residence, working on a book about what it means to carry words across languages, and the principles and worries of taking on a different narrative. As structures fell, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its quiet way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything ceased. A project my publisher had been about to send to press was stranded when the printing house shut down. Retailers shut one by one. One night, when the blasts were too nearby, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the library in my apartment, filled with dictionaries, rare books I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Dispersal and Devastation

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure towns – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a plant was ablaze, thick smoke curling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and threat seemed to pursue them.

During those days, moods swept through the city like a storm: swift terror, anxiety, moral outrage at the unfairness, then detachment. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their sashes; at a relative's house, every window was destroyed, the belongings lay broken, household items scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, painting at an stand, declining to let silence and dirt have the final say.

Translating Pain

A photograph circulated on social media of a young poet who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her verse went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an elderly woman hurrying between alleyways, yelling a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: transforming destruction into image, loss into lines, grief into longing.

The Craft as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still amidst destruction, I found myself rendering a story for young readers 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 experienced the loss of his sight yet continued producing until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all desired – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth reaching toward.

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

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his cell, asking for more resources, insisting that translation become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, hope, practice, anchor, and metaphor” all at once.

An Enduring Voice

And then came the photograph. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, marked but intact, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, stripped of life among the rubble and debris. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but enduring.

I stared at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a act with consequences”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else disappears. It is a subtle, stubborn rejection to vanish.