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

Among the rubble of a fallen structure, a particular sight lingered with me: a tome I had converted from English to Farsi, sitting partly concealed in dust and ash. Its front was torn and stained, its leaves curled and singed, but it was still readable. Still speaking.

A City Under Attack

Two days before, missiles started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, powerful blasts. The web was totally severed. I was in my flat, working on a text about what it means to move language across cultures, and the morals and anxieties of occupying a different voice. As structures collapsed, I sat polishing a text that argued, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything stopped. A book my publisher had been about to publish was halted when the printing house ceased operations. Shops closed one by one. One night, when the explosions were too nearby, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop worrying about the bookshelves in my apartment, holding lexicons, rare books 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 endure the night.

Dispersal and Grief

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous towns – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a picture: in the distance, a industrial site was on fire, thick smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and threat seemed to chase them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like weather: swift fear, apprehension, righteous anger at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick queries and references that translation demands.

Outside, concussive forces blew windows from their frames; at a relative's house, every sheet of glass was destroyed, the furniture lay ruined, objects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, painting at an easel, refusing to let stillness and debris have the last word.

Translating Grief

A picture was shared online of a young writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went was widely shared with her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an older woman dashing between passages, calling a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some buried memory. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: transforming ruin into picture, demise into verse, mourning into search.

The Craft as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of destruction, I found myself working on a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant 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 unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all yearned for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than literary craft: it was an act of defiance, of remaining, of enduring.

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

A Scarred Voice

And then came the photograph. I noticed it on a website and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, marked but surviving, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, drained of life among the debris and ruins. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but surviving.

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 erased. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a subtle, stubborn refusal to disappear.