Among the Ruined Debris of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Book I’d Translated

Among the debris of a destroyed structure, a single image lingered with me: a book I had converted from English to Persian, sitting partly concealed in dirt and soot. Its cover was shredded and dirtied, its pages bent and singed, but it was still legible. Still communicating.

A City Amid Bombardment

Two days before, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, powerful explosions. The web was totally severed. I was in my flat, translating a book about what it means to carry text across cultures, and the principles and worries of occupying another’s narrative. As edifices fell, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its subtle way, for the endurance of meaning.

Everything stopped. A project my publishing house had been about to publish was stuck when the printing house shut down. Retailers closed one by one. One night, when the booms were too imminent, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the library in my apartment, filled with reference books, hard-to-find editions I had spent years accumulating 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 endure the night.

Dispersal and Loss

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be safer locations – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a picture: in the background, a industrial site was ablaze, thick smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly elsewhere, and danger seemed to chase them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like a front: sudden fear, anxiety, indignation at the injustice, then detachment. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant look-ups and materials that translation demands.

Outside, shockwaves ripped windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every pane was shattered, the possessions lay ruined, objects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an easel, declining to let silence and dust have the ultimate victory.

Transforming Sorrow

A image was shared digitally of a young poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an elderly woman dashing between passages, yelling a name. People said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some repressed recollection. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: turning destruction into image, demise into lines, grief into quest.

The Craft as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst destruction, I found myself rendering a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet continued producing until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than literary craft: it was an act of defiance, of holding one's ground, of holding on.

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

A Scarred Legacy

And then came the picture. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, damaged but surviving, 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 debris. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but enduring.

I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else disappears. It is a persistent, unyielding declination to vanish.