Among those Bombed-Out Debris of an Residential Building, I Found a Book I Had Translated

Among the debris of a collapsed structure, a solitary sight lingered with me: a volume I had translated from English to Persian, lying partly concealed in dust and ash. Its cover was ripped and stained, its leaves bent and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking.

A City Amid Attack

Two days earlier, projectiles started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, powerful detonations. The digital network was totally disconnected. I was in my apartment, translating a book about what it means to move language across tongues, and the principles and worries of inhabiting someone else's voice. As structures collapsed, I sat revising a text that argued, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publisher had been about to go to print was stranded when the facility shut down. Shops shut one by one. One night, when the explosions were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the library in my apartment, filled with dictionaries, hard-to-find 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 survive the night.

Distance and Loss

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be safer locations – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a photo: in the distance, a industrial site was on fire, dark smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and threat seemed to chase them.

During those days, moods swept through the city like a storm: swift fear, anxiety, righteous anger at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick searches and sources that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces ripped windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every window was broken, the possessions lay damaged, personal effects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, painting at an stand, refusing to let silence and dirt have the ultimate victory.

Translating Pain

A image circulated online of a young poet 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 hurrying between alleys, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: changing destruction into art, demise into lines, sorrow into longing.

The Work as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself working on a fable about a king whose daughter will heal 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 persisted working until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all yearned for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than literary craft: it was an act of defiance, of staying put, of persisting.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his confinement, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that translation become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, goal, practice, foundation, and analogy” all at once.

A Scarred Legacy

And then came the photograph. I saw it on a news site and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, marked but surviving, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, devoid of life among the debris and debris. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, 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 act with consequences”, 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 haul stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, unyielding refusal to vanish.