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

Among the wreckage of a collapsed apartment block, a solitary sight lingered with me: a volume I had converted from the English language to Persian, sitting half-buried in dust and ash. Its front was torn and dirtied, its leaves curled and scorched, but it was still legible. Still uttering words.

An Urban Center Under Assault

Two days earlier, missiles began striking the city. There were no warnings, just sudden, powerful blasts. The web was completely severed. I was in my residence, translating a work about what it means to transport language across languages, and the principles and worries of inhabiting another’s voice. As buildings fell, I sat revising a text that contended, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of significance.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publisher had been about to publish was stuck when the printing house shut down. Shops closed one by one. One night, when the booms were too nearby, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the library in my apartment, holding reference books, rare volumes I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Dispersal and Devastation

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be safer locations – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a plant was burning, black smoke coiling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly somewhere else, and peril seemed to chase them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like a storm: swift dread, anxiety, moral outrage at the unfairness, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces ripped windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every window was broken, the furniture lay damaged, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, creating at an easel, declining to let stillness and dust have the last word.

Translating Pain

A picture circulated digitally of a 23-year-old writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went spread rapidly next to her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman hurrying between passages, calling a name. People said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some deep-seated remembrance. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: changing ruin into art, demise into poetry, mourning into longing.

The Craft as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself translating a fable about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant 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 striving 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 defiance, of holding one's ground, of enduring.

One day, in full 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 translation become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, aspiration, discipline, foundation, and analogy” all at once.

A Scarred Voice

And then came the picture. I saw it on a platform and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, scarred but surviving, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, stripped of life among the concrete and ruins. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but persisting.

I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a political act”, but I had never felt the full weight of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else falls away. It is a subtle, stubborn rejection to disappear.