Within those Devastated Debris of an Residential Building, I Found a Volume I Had Translated

Among the debris of a destroyed apartment block, a single vision remained with me: a volume I had translated from the English language to Farsi, lying half-buried in dust and soot. Its jacket was ripped and smudged, its sheets bent and scorched, but it was still readable. Still communicating.

A City Amid Attack

Two days prior, missiles started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just sudden, forceful explosions. The internet was completely severed. I was in my apartment, working on a text about what it means to move words across cultures, and the principles and anxieties of taking on a different perspective. As structures came down, I sat revising a text that suggested, in its subtle way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything stopped. A book my publishing house had been about to publish was halted when the printing house ceased operations. Retailers shut one by one. One night, when the booms were too imminent, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop worrying about the library in my apartment, filled with reference books, valuable books I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Distance and Grief

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous areas – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a photo: in the distance, a factory was on fire, black smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions passed over the city like weather: swift fear, unease, indignation at the wrong, then detachment. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick queries and materials that the work demands.

Outside, blast waves blew windows from their casings; at a family member's house, every window was destroyed, the belongings lay damaged, objects strewn 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.

Translating Sorrow

A photograph spread online of a young artist who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman dashing between alleyways, calling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some repressed remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: transforming destruction into picture, death into lines, sorrow into search.

The Work as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of destruction, I found myself rendering a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet continued producing until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all yearned for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than literary craft: it was an act of defiance, of staying put, of persisting.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his cell, asking for more resources, insisting that translation become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, hope, practice, anchor, and analogy” all at once.

A Scarred Legacy

And then came the picture. I noticed it on a platform and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, damaged but intact, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been devoid of color, drained of life among the concrete and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but enduring.

I stared at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a political act”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, determined declination to be silenced.