Among the Devastated Debris of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Book I Had Translated

In the debris of a fallen structure, a particular sight stayed with me: a volume I had translated from English to Persian, lying half-buried in dirt and soot. Its front was ripped and smudged, its sheets curled and scorched, but it was still decipherable. Still uttering words.

A City Amid Bombardment

Two days before, rockets started hitting the city. There were no sirens, just abrupt, violent explosions. The digital network was entirely severed. I was in my flat, translating a book about what it means to carry text across cultures, and the principles and worries of occupying another’s narrative. As edifices came down, I sat revising a text that argued, in its subtle way, for the persistence of purpose.

Everything ceased. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to publish was stranded when the printing house shut down. Shops locked their doors one by one. One night, when the booms were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the shelves in my apartment, stocked with reference books, rare volumes I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That library was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Distance and Grief

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure towns – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the background, a plant was burning, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and threat seemed to chase them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like a storm: swift terror, anxiety, moral outrage at the wrong, then apathy. Beyond the emotional toll, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate queries and references that translation demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every window was destroyed, the belongings lay broken, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, creating at an stand, choosing not to let stillness and debris have the last word.

Translating Sorrow

A image circulated digitally of a young artist who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an older woman dashing between alleyways, shouting a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried remembrance. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: changing devastation into image, demise into verse, sorrow into search.

Translation as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself translating a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet continued working until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all yearned for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond a skill: it was an act of perseverance, of holding one's ground, of enduring.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his prison cell, asking for more resources, insisting that language study become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, hope, discipline, anchor, and symbol” all at once.

A Scarred Legacy

And then came the image. I noticed it on a news site and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, marked but whole, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been devoid of color, drained of life among the rubble and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but enduring.

I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the full weight 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 endure when everything else falls away. It is a subtle, stubborn refusal to vanish.