Within the Ruined Remains of an Residential Building, I Saw a Book I Had Translated

Within the wreckage of a fallen structure, a single vision stayed with me: a tome I had converted from the English language to Farsi, lying half-buried in dirt and soot. Its cover was ripped and stained, its sheets curled and burned, but it was still readable. Still communicating.

A Metropolis Amid Bombardment

Two days earlier, projectiles began striking the city. There were no sirens, just abrupt, violent explosions. The web was entirely severed. I was in my residence, translating a book about what it means to transport words across languages, and the morals and worries of inhabiting a different voice. As structures fell, I sat editing a text that argued, in its quiet way, for the endurance of purpose.

Everything halted. A project my publishing house had been about to publish was halted 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 cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the library in my apartment, holding lexicons, rare books I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my career's work, 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 more secure towns – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a photo: in the faraway, a industrial site was burning, dark smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like a storm: sudden fear, apprehension, indignation at the wrong, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick look-ups and sources that the craft demands.

Outside, blast waves ripped windows from their frames; at a relative's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the possessions lay damaged, objects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, creating at an easel, declining to let silence and dust have the last word.

Converting Sorrow

A picture was shared digitally of a young artist who was died when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an older woman dashing between alleys, shouting a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some buried recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: transforming devastation into image, death into poetry, sorrow into search.

The Work as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of ruin, I found myself working on a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant 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 striving for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all longed for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond an art form: it was an act of defiance, of holding one's ground, of enduring.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his prison cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that translation become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, hope, rigor, foundation, and metaphor” all at once.

A Scarred Work

And then came the image. I noticed it on a news site and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, damaged but surviving, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, devoid of life among the rubble and debris. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – 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 true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, unyielding rejection to disappear.