Amid the Ruined Remains of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Book I’d Translated

Among the rubble of a fallen apartment block, a single sight remained with me: a tome I had translated from the English language to Farsi, lying partially covered in dust and ash. Its cover was torn and stained, its sheets curled and singed, but it was still legible. Still speaking.

A Metropolis During Assault

Two days before, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no sirens, just unexpected, violent blasts. The internet was entirely cut off. I was in my flat, rendering a book about what it means to move text across tongues, and the morals and worries of occupying a different narrative. As edifices fell, I sat revising a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the endurance of meaning.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to send to press was stuck when the printer ceased operations. Bookstores shut one by one. One night, when the booms were too nearby, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop thinking about the shelves in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, valuable editions I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Separation and Devastation

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous areas – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a photo: in the distance, a industrial site was ablaze, thick smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and danger seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like a front: swift fear, apprehension, indignation at the unfairness, then numbness. Beyond the emotional toll, the attack eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate searches and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, blast waves ripped windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every pane was shattered, the belongings lay damaged, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an easel, declining to let quiet and dust have the ultimate victory.

Converting Sorrow

A picture circulated digitally of a young artist who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her poem went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an elderly woman hurrying between alleyways, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some deep-seated memory. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: turning ruin into image, death into lines, sorrow into longing.

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself working on a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who lost 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 yearned for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth striving for.

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

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his confinement, asking for more resources, insisting that translation become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, hope, discipline, support, and metaphor” all at once.

A Scarred Work

And then came the picture. I noticed it on a platform and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, marked but surviving, my name printed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, stripped of life among the rubble 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 gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a political act”, 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 erased. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else falls away. It is a quiet, determined refusal to vanish.