Amid those Ruined Remains of an Residential Building, I Found a Book I Had Translated

Within the debris of a destroyed structure, a single image lingered with me: a volume I had converted from the English language to Persian, lying partially covered in dust and soot. Its front was ripped and dirtied, its sheets bent and scorched, but it was still legible. Still speaking.

A Metropolis During Attack

Two days before, projectiles began striking the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, powerful blasts. The internet was completely disconnected. I was in my flat, translating a text about what it means to move language across tongues, and the principles and concerns of inhabiting a different narrative. As buildings collapsed, I sat editing a text that contended, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything halted. A manuscript my publisher had been about to go to print was halted when the printing house closed. Retailers locked their doors one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, holding reference books, hard-to-find books I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That library was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Dispersal and Grief

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous locations – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a photo: in the faraway, a factory was ablaze, thick smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, feelings moved through the city like a storm: instant terror, unease, indignation at the unfairness, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and references that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces ripped windows from their frames; at a relative's house, every sheet of glass was destroyed, the possessions lay damaged, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an easel, refusing to let silence and dirt have the final say.

Converting Grief

A photograph spread digitally of a young writer who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an older woman hurrying between alleyways, shouting a name. People said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some deep-seated memory. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: transforming destruction into picture, demise into verse, sorrow into search.

Translation as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of ruin, I found myself working on a fable about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted working until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all yearned for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth reaching toward.

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

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his cell, asking for more resources, insisting that translation become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, hope, rigor, anchor, and analogy” all at once.

A Marked Legacy

And then came the picture. I saw it on a platform and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, marked but whole, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, stripped of life among the concrete and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – 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 transport stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else disappears. It is a persistent, stubborn refusal to disappear.