Within the Ruined Debris of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Volume I Had Translated

Within the wreckage of a destroyed building, a solitary vision remained with me: a tome I had rendered from the English language to Persian, lying partly concealed in dirt and ash. Its front was shredded and stained, its sheets curled and singed, but it was still legible. Still communicating.

A Metropolis Under Assault

Two days earlier, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, violent blasts. The web was completely cut off. I was in my apartment, translating a text about what it means to move words across cultures, and the ethics and worries of inhabiting someone else's narrative. As edifices collapsed, I sat revising a text that suggested, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of significance.

Everything halted. A project my publisher had been about to go to print was halted when the printer closed. Retailers shut 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 dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, stocked with reference books, valuable volumes I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Separation and Grief

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous locations – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a picture: in the background, a plant was ablaze, thick smoke coiling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like a front: sudden fear, anxiety, indignation at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate searches and references that the work demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their sashes; at a relative's house, every sheet of glass was destroyed, the furniture lay damaged, objects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an easel, choosing not to let quiet and dust have the ultimate victory.

Transforming Pain

A picture spread online of a 23-year-old writer who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her poem went was widely shared next to her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an older woman running between passages, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some buried memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: transforming destruction into picture, loss into poetry, mourning into longing.

Translation as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst devastation, I found myself working on 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 deep meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet continued creating until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all yearned for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than an art form: it was an act of defiance, of holding one's ground, of holding on.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his cell, asking for more resources, insisting that linguistic work become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, goal, rigor, anchor, and analogy” all at once.

An Enduring Legacy

And then came the photograph. I saw it on a news site and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, scarred but intact, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, drained of life among the rubble and ruins. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but surviving.

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