Amid those Devastated Debris of an Residential Building, I Found a Volume I Had Translated

In the rubble of a destroyed building, a solitary vision lingered with me: a volume I had rendered from English to Persian, resting partly concealed in dust and ash. Its jacket was torn and dirtied, its pages bent and singed, but it was still readable. Still uttering words.

An Urban Center Amid Assault

Two days prior, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, forceful detonations. The web was completely severed. I was in my apartment, rendering a work about what it means to transport words across cultures, and the ethics and worries of occupying someone else's perspective. As edifices came down, I sat editing a text that contended, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything stopped. A book my publishing house had been about to publish was stranded when the facility closed. Retailers locked their doors one by one. One night, when the booms were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the bookshelves in my apartment, stocked with reference books, valuable volumes I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That library was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Dispersal and Grief

My partner 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 background, a factory was ablaze, thick smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods moved through the city like a front: instant terror, anxiety, indignation at the wrong, then detachment. Beyond the emotional toll, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick searches and references that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their casings; at a family member's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the belongings lay broken, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, creating at an easel, declining to let quiet and debris have the last word.

Converting Sorrow

A photograph circulated online of a young writer who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared next to her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman dashing between alleyways, yelling a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some repressed remembrance. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: turning devastation into image, death into lines, grief into quest.

The Work as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst ruin, I found myself translating a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will recover 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 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 yearned for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than a skill: it was an act of defiance, of remaining, of persisting.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his prison cell, asking for more books, insisting that translation become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, hope, discipline, support, and metaphor” all at once.

A Scarred Work

And then came the photograph. I noticed it on a website and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, damaged but intact, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, devoid of life among the concrete and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been invisible, 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 statement”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice was important”. 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 subtle, unyielding refusal to vanish.