Within those Devastated Remains of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Volume I Had Translated

Among the rubble of a destroyed apartment block, a single vision remained with me: a tome I had converted from the English language to Farsi, resting half-buried in dirt and soot. Its front was shredded and stained, its sheets bent and burned, but it was still legible. Still uttering words.

An Urban Center Amid Assault

Two days prior, missiles started hitting the city. There were no sirens, just unexpected, forceful detonations. The digital network was entirely severed. I was in my flat, working on a book about what it means to carry language across cultures, and the principles and worries of occupying someone else's voice. As buildings came down, I sat editing a text that contended, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of significance.

Everything stopped. A book my publisher had been about to publish was halted when the facility closed. Bookstores shut one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the bookshelves in my apartment, stocked with reference books, valuable editions I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That library was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Dispersal and Loss

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 image: in the distance, a industrial site was on fire, thick smoke spiraling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to follow them.

During those days, feelings swept through the city like a storm: instant fear, anxiety, righteous anger at the injustice, then detachment. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant look-ups and references that the work demands.

Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every pane was shattered, the furniture lay broken, household items scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an stand, choosing not to let quiet and dirt have the last word.

Translating Pain

A image circulated online of a 23-year-old poet who was died when missiles struck a building. Her writing went spread rapidly next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an elderly woman dashing between alleyways, shouting a name. People said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some repressed recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: transforming ruin into image, death into poetry, grief into quest.

Translation as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst destruction, I found myself rendering a fable about a king whose daughter will get better 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 producing until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all longed for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than an art form: it was an act of perseverance, of remaining, of holding on.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that linguistic work become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, goal, discipline, anchor, and symbol” all at once.

A Scarred Legacy

And then came the photograph. I noticed it on a news site and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, scarred but whole, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been devoid of color, devoid of life among the concrete and ruins. For most of my career, I had been invisible, 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 was important”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else disappears. It is a persistent, unyielding declination to be silenced.