Among those Devastated Debris of an Residential Building, I Saw a Book I’d Translated

In the wreckage of a fallen building, a particular image lingered with me: a tome I had converted from English to Farsi, resting half-buried in dirt and ash. Its cover was torn and dirtied, its sheets curled and scorched, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking.

An Urban Center During Bombardment

Two days prior, rockets started hitting the city. There were no sirens, just sudden, violent detonations. The digital network was completely severed. I was in my residence, translating a text about what it means to carry words across languages, and the ethics and worries of occupying another’s narrative. As buildings came down, I sat polishing a text that argued, in its subtle way, for the endurance of purpose.

Everything ceased. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to publish was stranded when the facility shut down. Retailers shut one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, valuable editions I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That library was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Separation and Devastation

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous towns – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a picture: in the distance, a industrial site was ablaze, dark smoke coiling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and danger seemed to chase them.

During those days, feelings moved through the city like weather: swift terror, apprehension, indignation at the wrong, then apathy. Beyond the personal impact, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick searches and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces blew windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every window was broken, the possessions lay damaged, objects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, working at an stand, choosing not to let quiet and debris have the final say.

Translating Grief

A photograph spread on social media of a young poet who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her poem went spread rapidly next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an older woman hurrying between passages, calling a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some deep-seated memory. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: changing devastation into picture, death into verse, mourning into search.

Translation as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself translating a fable about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet kept producing until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all yearned for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than literary craft: it was an act of resistance, of holding one's ground, of enduring.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his confinement, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that linguistic work become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, aspiration, practice, anchor, and symbol” all at once.

An Enduring Legacy

And then came the picture. I noticed it on a platform and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, damaged but surviving, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, 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 enduring.

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 complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else falls away. It is a quiet, stubborn refusal to disappear.