Amid the Ruined Remains of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Book I Had Translated

In the debris of a destroyed apartment block, a particular vision lingered with me: a volume I had rendered from English to Farsi, resting partially covered in dirt and soot. Its jacket was ripped and dirtied, its leaves bent and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still uttering words.

A City During Assault

Two days before, missiles started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, powerful explosions. The web was completely severed. I was in my apartment, working on a text about what it means to move words across languages, and the principles and anxieties of occupying a different perspective. As structures collapsed, I sat editing a text that argued, in its understated way, for the persistence of meaning.

Everything ceased. A manuscript my publisher had been about to publish was stuck when the printing house ceased operations. Retailers locked their doors one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop worrying about the bookshelves in my apartment, filled with lexicons, rare books I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Dispersal and Loss

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure locations – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a photo: in the distance, a industrial site was ablaze, dark smoke spiraling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly somewhere else, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, emotions moved through the city like a storm: instant terror, anxiety, righteous anger at the unfairness, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and materials that translation demands.

Outside, concussive forces ripped windows from their casings; at a relative's house, every sheet of glass was destroyed, the furniture lay ruined, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, painting at an easel, choosing not to let quiet and dirt have the final say.

Converting Sorrow

A picture spread online of a 23-year-old writer who was lost 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 older woman running between alleyways, shouting a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some deep-seated memory. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: changing devastation into image, demise into lines, grief into longing.

The Work as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by ruin, I found myself rendering a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet continued producing until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than a skill: it was an act of resistance, of remaining, of holding on.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his prison cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that translation become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, hope, discipline, support, and analogy” all at once.

An Enduring Legacy

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

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 was important”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, determined declination to be silenced.