Among the Devastated Debris of an Residential Building, I Found a Volume I’d Translated

Among the rubble of a destroyed building, a particular image remained with me: a tome I had translated from the English language to Persian, lying partly concealed in dust and ash. Its front was ripped and dirtied, its leaves curled and singed, but it was still legible. Still speaking.

An Urban Center During Assault

Two days before, rockets started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, forceful detonations. The internet was completely cut off. I was in my residence, rendering a text about what it means to carry language across cultures, and the morals and worries of taking on a different perspective. As structures fell, I sat revising a text that contended, in its quiet way, for the endurance of meaning.

Everything ceased. A book my publishing house had been about to publish was stuck when the printing house closed. Bookstores closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the bookshelves in my apartment, holding reference books, hard-to-find volumes I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That library was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Separation and Loss

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure areas – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a picture: in the faraway, a plant was burning, black smoke coiling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly somewhere else, and danger seemed to chase them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like a front: swift dread, apprehension, moral outrage at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the emotional toll, the shelling eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick searches and materials that the work demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the furniture lay broken, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, creating at an stand, choosing not to let quiet and dirt have the ultimate victory.

Converting Sorrow

A image circulated on social media of a young poet who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her poem went was widely shared with her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an older woman dashing between alleyways, shouting a name. People said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some deep-seated remembrance. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: turning devastation into picture, loss into lines, sorrow into quest.

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself rendering a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet continued producing until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than a skill: it was an act of defiance, of remaining, of holding on.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his confinement, asking for more resources, insisting that language study become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, aspiration, practice, foundation, and analogy” all at once.

A Scarred Work

And then came the image. I spotted it on a platform and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, scarred but whole, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, drained of life among the debris and ruins. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but persisting.

I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a act with consequences”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else disappears. It is a subtle, unyielding declination to be silenced.