Among the Ruined Debris of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Book I’d Translated

In the rubble of a fallen structure, a solitary image lingered with me: a volume I had translated from English to Persian, sitting half-buried in dirt and ash. Its jacket was shredded and dirtied, its sheets bent and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating.

A City Under Attack

Two days before, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, forceful explosions. The web was totally disconnected. I was in my residence, translating a text about what it means to move text across cultures, and the morals and anxieties of taking on another’s narrative. As buildings collapsed, I sat editing a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything halted. A project my publisher had been about to go to print was stranded when the printing house ceased operations. Shops closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop thinking about the shelves in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, valuable volumes I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my career'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 more secure areas – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a image: in the distance, a factory was burning, thick smoke coiling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly somewhere else, and danger seemed to pursue them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like weather: swift dread, anxiety, indignation at the wrong, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and materials that translation demands.

Outside, blast waves tore windows from their casings; at a family member's house, every window was shattered, the possessions lay damaged, objects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an stand, refusing to let silence and debris have the last word.

Converting Pain

A photograph circulated digitally of a 23-year-old poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an elderly woman dashing between passages, yelling a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried recollection. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: transforming ruin into art, loss into lines, grief into search.

The Craft as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself working on a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will recover 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 aiming at the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all yearned for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward.

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

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

An Enduring Legacy

And then came the picture. I noticed it on a news site and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, marked but surviving, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, devoid of life among the debris and ruins. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – 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 complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, stubborn rejection to vanish.