Within the Devastated Remains of an Residential Building, I Saw a Book I’d Translated

Among the wreckage of a destroyed structure, a solitary image stayed with me: a tome I had rendered from English to Farsi, resting partially covered in dust and soot. Its jacket was torn and stained, its sheets curled and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating.

A Metropolis Amid Assault

Two days earlier, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no sirens, just abrupt, violent detonations. The digital network was entirely severed. I was in my apartment, working on a text about what it means to carry language across tongues, and the morals and worries of taking on someone else's voice. As buildings collapsed, I sat revising a text that argued, in its understated way, for the endurance of purpose.

Everything stopped. A book my publishing house had been about to go to print was stranded when the printer shut down. Shops shut one by one. One night, when the booms were too nearby, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the bookshelves in my apartment, filled with dictionaries, hard-to-find books I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Separation and Grief

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous towns – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the distance, a factory was ablaze, dark smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions passed over the city like a front: sudden fear, apprehension, moral outrage at the wrong, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and references that the work demands.

Outside, shockwaves ripped windows from their frames; at a relative's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the possessions lay ruined, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an stand, refusing to let stillness and dust have the ultimate victory.

Converting Pain

A photograph circulated online of a young artist who was died when missiles struck a building. Her poem went was widely shared next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an elderly woman dashing between alleys, shouting a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some deep-seated remembrance. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

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

The Craft as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by ruin, I found myself translating a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted creating until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all longed for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than an art form: it was an act of resistance, of holding one's ground, of persisting.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his prison cell, asking for more books, insisting that translation become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, aspiration, rigor, foundation, and symbol” all at once.

A Scarred Legacy

And then came the photograph. I spotted it on a platform and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, marked but intact, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, devoid 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 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 complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, stubborn refusal to be silenced.