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

Within the debris of a fallen building, a particular vision remained with me: a tome I had translated from English to Farsi, resting partially covered in dust and soot. Its front was ripped and stained, its pages curled and scorched, but it was still readable. Still communicating.

A City Under Attack

Two days prior, projectiles began striking the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, powerful detonations. The digital network was totally severed. I was in my apartment, translating a book about what it means to move text across tongues, and the morals and worries of inhabiting a different voice. As edifices collapsed, I sat revising a text that argued, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything stopped. A project my publisher had been about to send to press was halted when the facility closed. Shops shut one by one. One night, when the explosions were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop worrying about the bookshelves in my apartment, stocked with lexicons, valuable books I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Dispersal and Devastation

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be safer towns – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a photo: in the background, a industrial site was on fire, thick smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and danger seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions passed over the city like weather: swift fear, unease, indignation at the unfairness, then detachment. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate searches and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their casings; at a family member's house, every window was shattered, the possessions lay damaged, objects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an easel, refusing to let silence and dirt have the final say.

Translating Sorrow

A picture circulated digitally of a young artist who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared next to her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an elderly woman dashing between alleyways, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some buried remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: changing destruction into picture, death into lines, sorrow into longing.

Translation as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still amidst ruin, I found myself rendering a fable about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet continued working until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond an art form: it was an act of defiance, of remaining, of enduring.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his confinement, asking for more resources, insisting that language study become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, hope, discipline, foundation, and symbol” all at once.

A Marked Work

And then came the image. I spotted it on a platform and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, damaged but intact, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, devoid of life among the concrete and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but surviving.

I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a act with consequences”, 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 erased. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else disappears. It is a persistent, determined rejection to vanish.