Among the Bombed-Out Debris of an Residential Building, I Found a Volume I Had Translated

In the wreckage of a collapsed apartment block, a solitary image remained with me: a book I had converted from the English language to Farsi, sitting half-buried in dirt and soot. Its cover was ripped and dirtied, its pages curled and singed, but it was still readable. Still uttering words.

A City Under Assault

Two days earlier, missiles commenced attacking the city. There were no sirens, just unexpected, violent detonations. The web was completely disconnected. I was in my apartment, working on a text about what it means to move language across tongues, and the morals and concerns of inhabiting another’s narrative. As buildings fell, I sat polishing a text that argued, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of significance.

Everything halted. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to go to print was halted when the facility shut down. Shops shut one by one. One night, when the blasts were too nearby, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, filled with dictionaries, valuable books I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Distance and Devastation

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be safer towns – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a picture: in the background, a factory was burning, thick smoke spiraling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to follow them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like a storm: sudden terror, apprehension, righteous anger at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate searches and references that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every pane was broken, the possessions lay ruined, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, painting at an stand, declining to let silence and debris have the ultimate victory.

Translating Sorrow

A image was shared digitally of a 23-year-old poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an older woman running between passages, yelling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some buried remembrance. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: changing destruction into picture, demise into poetry, mourning into longing.

The Work as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst ruin, I found myself translating a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound 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 striving for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all longed for – 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 remaining, of enduring.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his cell, asking for more books, insisting that translation become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, aspiration, practice, support, and metaphor” all at once.

An Enduring Legacy

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 works, damaged but surviving, my name shown 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 debris. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – 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 fire, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, stubborn refusal to disappear.