Within those Bombed-Out Remains of an Residential Building, I Found a Volume I’d Translated

In the debris of a destroyed structure, a single image stayed with me: a book I had converted from the English language to Persian, lying partially covered in dirt and soot. Its front was ripped and stained, its sheets bent and burned, but it was still legible. Still uttering words.

An Urban Center Amid Attack

Two days prior, missiles started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, powerful blasts. The web was completely disconnected. I was in my apartment, working on a book about what it means to move language across languages, and the morals and worries of occupying a different narrative. As buildings came down, I sat revising a text that argued, in its subtle way, for the persistence of meaning.

Everything stopped. A book my publishing house had been about to send to press was stranded when the facility shut down. Bookstores shut 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 worrying about the library in my apartment, holding reference books, rare books I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Distance and Devastation

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure locations – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a factory was burning, thick smoke coiling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, emotions moved through the city like weather: swift terror, unease, indignation at the injustice, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the bombardment eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate queries and sources that translation demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every pane was broken, the belongings lay broken, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an stand, refusing to let stillness and debris have the last word.

Transforming Pain

A picture was shared on social media of a young writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her poem went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an older woman running 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 buried memory. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: changing destruction into image, loss into verse, sorrow into longing.

The Craft as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst devastation, I found myself rendering a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet kept creating until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all desired – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond literary craft: it was an act of resistance, of staying put, of holding on.

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

A Scarred Work

And then came the image. I noticed it on a news site and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, scarred but surviving, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, stripped of life among the debris and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but enduring.

I stared at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a act with consequences”, but I had never felt the full weight of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else disappears. It is a persistent, unyielding refusal to disappear.