Within those Devastated Debris of an Residential Building, I Found a Book I’d Translated

Among the rubble of a fallen building, a single sight remained with me: a book I had translated from English to Persian, lying half-buried in dirt and ash. Its cover was shredded and dirtied, its pages bent and burned, but it was still legible. Still speaking.

A City Under Attack

Two days earlier, projectiles started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, forceful detonations. The web was completely cut off. I was in my flat, working on a work about what it means to carry language across languages, and the ethics and anxieties of occupying a different perspective. As buildings collapsed, I sat editing a text that contended, in its understated way, for the endurance of meaning.

Everything halted. A book my publisher had been about to publish was stuck when the printing house shut down. Retailers closed one by one. One night, when the explosions were too nearby, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop thinking about the shelves in my apartment, holding dictionaries, 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.

Distance and Devastation

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous areas – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a picture: in the distance, a factory was burning, thick smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and threat seemed to chase them.

During those days, moods passed over the city like a front: instant fear, apprehension, righteous anger at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the emotional toll, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick look-ups and references that the craft demands.

Outside, blast waves blew windows from their casings; at a family member's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the furniture lay ruined, objects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an easel, declining to let silence and dirt have the ultimate victory.

Transforming Pain

A image was shared digitally of a 23-year-old writer who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared with her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an older woman dashing between alleyways, yelling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some deep-seated remembrance. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: turning ruin into picture, demise into verse, grief into search.

Translation as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of devastation, I found myself working on a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet kept creating 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 a skill: it was an act of defiance, of holding one's ground, of persisting.

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

A Scarred Voice

And then came the picture. I saw it on a news site and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, scarred but intact, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been black and white, stripped 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 visible – scarred, but surviving.

I gazed upon 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 bombardment, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else disappears. It is a subtle, unyielding declination to vanish.