Within the Devastated Remains of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Volume I Had Translated

Among the debris of a destroyed building, a solitary vision stayed with me: a book I had rendered from English to Persian, sitting partially covered in dirt and ash. Its front was torn and stained, its leaves bent and scorched, but it was still readable. Still uttering words.

A Metropolis During Bombardment

Two days earlier, projectiles began striking the city. There were no sirens, just abrupt, powerful detonations. The internet was completely disconnected. I was in my apartment, translating a book about what it means to move language across tongues, and the ethics and anxieties of occupying a different perspective. As structures fell, I sat revising a text that contended, in its subtle way, for the endurance of meaning.

Everything ceased. A project my publishing house had been about to go to print was halted when the printing house ceased operations. Shops locked their doors one by one. One night, when the explosions were too close, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the library in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, valuable volumes I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Dispersal and Devastation

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure areas – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a picture: in the background, a industrial site was burning, dark smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to pursue them.

During those days, moods passed over the city like weather: sudden fear, anxiety, moral outrage at the wrong, then detachment. Beyond the personal impact, the attack eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and materials that translation demands.

Outside, shockwaves ripped windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every pane was destroyed, the furniture lay ruined, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, painting at an easel, declining to let stillness and dirt have the last word.

Converting Pain

A image spread online of a 23-year-old poet who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an aged woman running between passages, calling a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some deep-seated memory. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: transforming devastation into art, demise into verse, grief into quest.

The Work 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 recover only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet continued working until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than an art form: it was an act of perseverance, of staying put, of enduring.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that language study become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, goal, rigor, anchor, and metaphor” all at once.

An Enduring Voice

And then came the photograph. I noticed it on a platform and saw that, amid 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 colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, stripped 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 surviving.

I stared at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the full weight of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else falls away. It is a persistent, stubborn declination to vanish.