Amid the Bombed-Out Debris of an Residential Building, I Found a Book I’d Translated

Within the wreckage of a collapsed structure, a single image remained with me: a tome I had converted from the English language to Persian, lying partly concealed in dust and soot. Its jacket was torn and dirtied, its pages curled and scorched, but it was still legible. Still speaking.

A City Amid Attack

Two days before, missiles began striking the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, violent explosions. The web was completely cut off. I was in my flat, translating a work about what it means to move words across tongues, and the ethics and anxieties of occupying someone else's narrative. As edifices came down, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the persistence of significance.

Everything ceased. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to go to print was halted when the printing house shut down. Bookstores locked their doors one by one. One night, when the blasts were too nearby, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the bookshelves in my apartment, holding reference books, valuable books I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Dispersal and Grief

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous towns – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a factory was burning, thick smoke curling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to chase them.

During those days, emotions moved through the city like weather: sudden terror, apprehension, indignation at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and references that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces blew windows from their sashes; at a relative's house, every pane was shattered, the belongings lay broken, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an easel, refusing to let silence and debris have the last word.

Translating Pain

A photograph circulated digitally of a 23-year-old poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went viral with her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an elderly woman running between alleys, calling a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some repressed memory. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: changing ruin into image, death into poetry, sorrow into search.

The Work as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself rendering a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet kept creating until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all yearned for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth pursuing.

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

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his confinement, asking for more books, insisting that translation become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, goal, practice, support, and analogy” all at once.

A Scarred Work

And then came the photograph. I spotted it on a platform and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, scarred but whole, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, drained of life among the concrete and debris. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but surviving.

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 true gravity 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 remain when everything else falls away. It is a persistent, determined declination to be silenced.