Within the Bombed-Out Debris of an Residential Building, I Found a Book I Had Translated

Among the debris of a destroyed structure, a particular image lingered with me: a book I had translated from English to Farsi, sitting partly concealed in dust and soot. Its jacket was torn and smudged, its sheets curled and singed, but it was still legible. Still communicating.

A Metropolis Under Attack

Two days before, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just sudden, violent explosions. The digital network was completely cut off. I was in my apartment, translating a text about what it means to move words across cultures, and the principles and anxieties of occupying another’s narrative. As edifices came down, I sat polishing a text that argued, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything ceased. A book my publisher had been about to go to print was stuck when the printing house shut down. Bookstores closed one by one. One night, when the explosions were too nearby, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, stocked with lexicons, valuable editions I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That library was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Separation and Devastation

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure towns – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a image: in the distance, a plant was on fire, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and danger seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like weather: instant terror, anxiety, indignation at the wrong, then apathy. Beyond the personal impact, the bombardment 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, blast waves ripped windows from their frames; at a relative's house, every window was destroyed, the furniture lay ruined, personal effects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, creating at an easel, declining to let silence and dust have the last word.

Converting Sorrow

A picture spread digitally of a 23-year-old artist who was killed 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 hurrying between passages, calling a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some buried recollection. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: turning devastation into art, death into lines, sorrow into quest.

Translation as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst destruction, I found myself working on a story for young readers 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 continued creating 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 pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond a skill: it was an act of resistance, of remaining, of persisting.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his cell, asking for more books, insisting that translation become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, aspiration, rigor, support, and analogy” all at once.

A Scarred Legacy

And then came the image. I spotted it on a website and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, marked but intact, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, devoid of life among the debris and debris. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – 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 fire, 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 persist when everything else disappears. It is a subtle, determined declination to vanish.