Among those Devastated Remains of an Residential Building, I Found a Volume I Had Translated

Among the rubble of a fallen building, a single image lingered with me: a tome I had translated from English to Persian, resting half-buried in dirt and ash. Its cover was ripped and dirtied, its sheets curled and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating.

A Metropolis Under Attack

Two days prior, missiles began striking the city. There were no sirens, just abrupt, forceful detonations. The digital network was completely disconnected. I was in my flat, working on a book about what it means to carry language across languages, and the morals and worries of inhabiting someone else's voice. As buildings came down, I sat editing a text that suggested, in its quiet way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything stopped. A book my publishing house had been about to go to print was stranded when the facility closed. Retailers shut one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop worrying about the library in my apartment, holding dictionaries, rare books I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Distance and Grief

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure locations – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a picture: in the distance, a plant was burning, dark smoke spiraling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions moved through the city like a storm: swift dread, apprehension, righteous anger at the wrong, then numbness. Beyond the psychological cost, 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 cousin's house, every window was destroyed, the belongings lay broken, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an stand, choosing not to let quiet and dirt have the final say.

Transforming Grief

A picture circulated digitally of a young poet who was died when missiles struck a building. Her poem went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an elderly woman hurrying between alleys, calling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some deep-seated recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: changing ruin into art, demise into poetry, grief into search.

Translation as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by ruin, I found myself rendering a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted working until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all longed for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond literary craft: it was an act of resistance, of holding one's ground, of enduring.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that linguistic work become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, goal, practice, support, and symbol” all at once.

A Marked Work

And then came the photograph. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, scarred but whole, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, drained of life among the debris and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but persisting.

I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under attack, 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 falls away. It is a quiet, determined rejection to be silenced.