Among the Devastated Debris of an Residential Building, I Saw a Volume I Had Translated

In the debris of a destroyed building, a solitary image remained with me: a tome I had rendered from the English language to Farsi, lying partially covered in dust and ash. Its jacket was shredded and dirtied, its leaves bent and burned, but it was still readable. Still uttering words.

A City Amid Bombardment

Two days earlier, missiles commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, violent explosions. The web was completely cut off. I was in my apartment, working on a book about what it means to transport words across cultures, and the principles and worries of inhabiting someone else's voice. As buildings fell, I sat editing a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything ceased. A book my publisher had been about to go to print was halted when the facility ceased operations. Shops shut one by one. One night, when the blasts were too nearby, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the bookshelves in my apartment, holding lexicons, rare volumes I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Separation and Devastation

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be safer areas – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a photo: in the background, a factory was ablaze, dark smoke spiraling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods moved through the city like a front: instant terror, apprehension, moral outrage at the wrong, then apathy. Beyond the personal impact, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, blast waves blew windows from their sashes; at a family member's house, every pane was destroyed, the possessions lay damaged, objects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, working at an easel, refusing to let silence and debris have the ultimate victory.

Transforming Pain

A photograph was shared online of a 23-year-old poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went was widely shared next to her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an older woman dashing between passages, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some repressed memory. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: changing destruction into art, demise into poetry, mourning into search.

The Work as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of devastation, I found myself working on a fable about a king whose daughter will heal 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 creating until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all yearned for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth striving for.

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

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his confinement, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that language study become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, hope, practice, support, and metaphor” all at once.

An Enduring Work

And then came the image. I saw it on a website and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, damaged but intact, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, stripped of life among the concrete and ruins. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but enduring.

I stared at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a political act”, but I had never felt the full weight of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, determined declination to vanish.