Amid the Ruined Remains of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Book I Had Translated

Within the rubble of a collapsed structure, a particular vision stayed with me: a volume I had translated from the English language to Farsi, lying half-buried in dust and ash. Its front was torn and dirtied, its pages bent and scorched, but it was still legible. Still speaking.

A Metropolis Under Bombardment

Two days earlier, missiles began striking the city. There were no sirens, just sudden, forceful blasts. The digital network was entirely severed. I was in my flat, rendering a text about what it means to carry language across languages, and the ethics and concerns of inhabiting someone else's narrative. As buildings came down, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of significance.

Everything ceased. A project my publisher had been about to send to press was halted when the printer ceased operations. Shops locked their doors one by one. One night, when the explosions were too imminent, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the bookshelves in my apartment, filled with lexicons, hard-to-find books I had spent years collecting 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 survive the night.

Separation and Devastation

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous areas – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a factory was ablaze, black smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods swept through the city like a front: sudden dread, apprehension, moral outrage at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the personal impact, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and references that the work demands.

Outside, concussive forces blew windows from their casings; at a family member's house, every pane was destroyed, the belongings lay ruined, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, creating at an easel, choosing not to let silence and dust have the final say.

Converting Pain

A image circulated on social media of a 23-year-old writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an older woman dashing between passages, yelling a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some deep-seated memory. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: turning destruction into art, demise into poetry, sorrow into search.

The Craft as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of 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 creating until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all yearned for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth reaching toward.

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

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

A Scarred Legacy

And then came the photograph. 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 whole, my name printed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, stripped of life among the debris and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – 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 true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under attack, 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 endure when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, stubborn declination to disappear.