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

Among the wreckage of a collapsed building, a solitary vision stayed with me: a tome I had translated from the English language to Persian, resting partially covered in dirt and ash. Its jacket was ripped and smudged, its leaves curled and burned, but it was still readable. Still communicating.

A Metropolis During Assault

Two days prior, rockets started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, forceful blasts. The internet was totally disconnected. I was in my apartment, working on a work about what it means to move language across cultures, and the ethics and worries of inhabiting someone else's voice. As buildings fell, I sat polishing a text that contended, in its understated way, for the persistence of purpose.

Everything ceased. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to send to press was stranded when the printer shut down. Shops closed one by one. One night, when the booms were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, holding reference books, valuable editions I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That library was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Separation and Loss

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be safer locations – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the distance, a factory was ablaze, thick smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, moods swept through the city like weather: swift fear, unease, moral outrage at the injustice, then detachment. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate queries and references that translation demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every window was shattered, the possessions lay broken, household items scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, creating at an easel, choosing not to let stillness and dirt have the ultimate victory.

Translating Pain

A image spread on social media of a young poet who was died when missiles struck a building. Her writing went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an aged woman running between passages, calling a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried remembrance. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: turning destruction into picture, death into poetry, grief into search.

Translation as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of devastation, I found myself rendering 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 continued working until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all yearned for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than literary craft: it was an act of perseverance, of remaining, of enduring.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his confinement, asking for more books, insisting that linguistic work become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, goal, discipline, anchor, and symbol” all at once.

A Scarred Legacy

And then came the image. I spotted it on a platform and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, damaged but intact, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, drained of life among the rubble and ruins. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but enduring.

I gazed upon 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 attack, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else falls away. It is a persistent, unyielding rejection to vanish.