Among those Devastated Remains of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Volume I’d Translated

In the wreckage of a fallen structure, a particular sight remained with me: a tome I had rendered from English to Persian, resting partially covered in dirt and ash. Its front was shredded and stained, its sheets curled and singed, but it was still readable. Still communicating.

A Metropolis Amid Bombardment

Two days earlier, rockets commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, powerful blasts. The digital network was totally cut off. I was in my flat, translating a work about what it means to move text across languages, and the ethics and worries of inhabiting a different perspective. As edifices came down, I sat polishing a text that argued, in its quiet way, for the endurance of purpose.

Everything ceased. A manuscript my publisher had been about to go to print was halted when the printer closed. Bookstores locked their doors one by one. One night, when the explosions were too close, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, filled with dictionaries, valuable editions I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Distance and Loss

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be safer towns – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a photo: in the distance, a plant was ablaze, dark smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, feelings moved through the city like a front: sudden terror, anxiety, indignation at the wrong, then apathy. Beyond the personal impact, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant look-ups and references that translation demands.

Outside, shockwaves ripped windows from their sashes; at a family member's house, every pane was broken, the furniture lay damaged, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, working at an stand, refusing to let quiet and dirt have the final say.

Transforming Grief

A picture circulated online of a young writer who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared next to her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an older woman dashing between alleys, calling a name. Neighbours 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 transforming, in our own way: transforming destruction into picture, death into poetry, grief into longing.

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of devastation, I found myself translating a fable about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted producing until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all longed for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond a skill: it was an act of resistance, of staying put, of holding on.

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

A Marked Work

And then came the picture. I noticed it on a website and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, damaged but intact, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, drained of life among the rubble and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but persisting.

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 true gravity 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 remain when everything else crumbles. It is a subtle, stubborn rejection to be silenced.