Amid those Devastated Debris of an Residential Building, I Saw a Volume I Had Translated

Among the debris of a destroyed apartment block, a particular sight stayed with me: a volume I had rendered from the English language to Persian, sitting half-buried in dust and ash. Its front was shredded and smudged, its leaves bent and burned, but it was still readable. Still uttering words.

An Urban Center During Attack

Two days earlier, rockets commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, forceful explosions. The internet was completely severed. I was in my apartment, translating a book about what it means to move language across cultures, and the principles and concerns of occupying someone else's perspective. As edifices came down, I sat editing a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the persistence of meaning.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publisher had been about to publish was stranded when the printer shut down. Bookstores closed one by one. One night, when the booms were too close, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, stocked with reference books, rare editions I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Dispersal and Loss

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be safer locations – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a picture: in the faraway, a plant was burning, dark smoke spiraling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods passed over the city like a front: instant terror, unease, righteous anger at the wrong, then numbness. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick searches and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, blast waves blew windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every window was broken, the possessions lay broken, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, painting at an easel, declining to let silence and dirt have the ultimate victory.

Translating Pain

A image spread online of a 23-year-old writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went viral alongside her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman hurrying between alleyways, calling a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried recollection. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: turning ruin into art, demise into lines, mourning into longing.

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst ruin, I found myself translating a fable about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet kept producing until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all yearned for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than a skill: it was an act of defiance, of staying put, of persisting.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that linguistic work become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, goal, rigor, anchor, and analogy” all at once.

A Scarred Voice

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

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 full weight 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 transport stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else disappears. It is a subtle, unyielding refusal to be silenced.