Among those Devastated Remains of an Residential Building, I Found a Volume I’d Translated

In the rubble of a destroyed apartment block, a solitary sight remained with me: a book I had converted from English to Persian, lying half-buried in dust and soot. Its cover was ripped and dirtied, its sheets bent and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating.

A City Under Assault

Two days before, projectiles started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, violent explosions. The web was totally severed. I was in my residence, translating a text about what it means to transport words across languages, and the principles and worries of taking on a different narrative. As structures came down, I sat revising a text that argued, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything stopped. A book my publishing house had been about to send to press was stuck when the printer ceased operations. Shops closed one by one. One night, when the explosions were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the bookshelves in my apartment, stocked with reference books, valuable books I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That library was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Distance and Grief

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be safer towns – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a plant was ablaze, dark smoke coiling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, moods passed over the city like weather: instant terror, apprehension, righteous anger at the injustice, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the bombardment destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant look-ups and references that the work demands.

Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every window was broken, the belongings lay ruined, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an stand, choosing not to let stillness and debris have the last word.

Transforming Sorrow

A picture spread on social media of a young artist who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her poem went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an aged woman hurrying between alleys, calling a name. People said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some deep-seated remembrance. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: transforming devastation into picture, loss into verse, grief into search.

The Work as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by ruin, I found myself rendering 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 profound meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet continued creating until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all yearned for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than a skill: it was an act of perseverance, of holding one's ground, of enduring.

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 resources, insisting that translation become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, goal, discipline, support, and analogy” all at once.

An Enduring Legacy

And then came the photograph. I noticed it on a news site and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, scarred but surviving, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, drained 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 true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else falls away. It is a persistent, determined declination to disappear.