Amid those Ruined Remains of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Volume I Had Translated

In the debris of a collapsed apartment block, a single vision lingered with me: a tome I had rendered from the English language to Farsi, resting half-buried in dirt and soot. Its cover was shredded and dirtied, its leaves bent and scorched, but it was still readable. Still speaking.

A City During Attack

Two days earlier, projectiles began striking the city. There were no sirens, just abrupt, forceful detonations. The web was entirely disconnected. I was in my residence, translating a book about what it means to move words across cultures, and the morals and anxieties of inhabiting someone else's perspective. As structures fell, I sat revising a text that suggested, in its quiet way, for the endurance of meaning.

Everything stopped. A project my publishing house had been about to send to press was stranded when the printer shut down. Retailers shut one by one. One night, when the explosions were too nearby, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, holding dictionaries, hard-to-find editions I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That library was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Distance and Devastation

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure locations – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a photo: in the faraway, a factory was on fire, thick smoke curling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and threat seemed to chase them.

During those days, moods passed over the city like weather: sudden dread, unease, indignation at the unfairness, then numbness. Beyond the emotional toll, the attack eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick queries and sources that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every window was destroyed, the possessions lay broken, household items scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an stand, refusing to let stillness and debris have the ultimate victory.

Transforming Grief

A picture spread digitally of a 23-year-old poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an older woman running between alleyways, calling a name. People said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some buried remembrance. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: changing ruin into art, death into lines, grief into search.

The Craft as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of devastation, I found myself working on a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet continued creating until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all yearned for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward.

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

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

A Marked Legacy

And then came the image. I noticed it on a website and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, damaged but surviving, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, drained of life among the concrete and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but persisting.

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 fire, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else disappears. It is a persistent, stubborn refusal to be silenced.