Amid those Bombed-Out Debris of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Book I Had Translated

Within the debris of a destroyed building, a particular vision remained with me: a book I had rendered from English to Farsi, resting half-buried in dirt and ash. Its front was torn and smudged, its pages curled and burned, but it was still legible. Still speaking.

An Urban Center Under Assault

Two days earlier, missiles started hitting the city. There were no sirens, just unexpected, violent detonations. The internet was totally disconnected. I was in my flat, translating a work about what it means to carry language across tongues, and the ethics and concerns of inhabiting a different perspective. As edifices collapsed, I sat editing a text that contended, in its understated way, for the persistence of meaning.

Everything halted. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to send to press was halted when the facility shut down. Shops shut one by one. One night, when the explosions were too nearby, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the library in my apartment, holding dictionaries, valuable books I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Distance and Loss

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous towns – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a image: in the distance, a plant was burning, thick smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, emotions moved through the city like a front: instant dread, anxiety, indignation at the unfairness, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant look-ups and references that translation demands.

Outside, concussive forces ripped windows from their casings; at a relative's house, every pane was destroyed, the belongings lay ruined, objects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an easel, declining to let stillness and dirt have the final say.

Converting Grief

A photograph spread online of a 23-year-old artist who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared with her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman running between alleys, shouting a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some deep-seated recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: changing devastation into art, loss into lines, sorrow into quest.

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself working on a story for young readers 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 lost his sight yet continued working until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all yearned for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth reaching toward.

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 bright sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his prison cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that language study become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, hope, practice, support, and analogy” all at once.

A Scarred Legacy

And then came the image. I noticed it on a website and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, marked but surviving, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been black and white, drained of life among the debris and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been invisible, 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 erased. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, stubborn declination to be silenced.