Among those Ruined Debris of an Residential Building, I Found a Book I Had Translated

In the rubble of a collapsed building, a single sight lingered with me: a book I had rendered from the English language to Farsi, lying partly concealed in dust and soot. Its jacket was shredded and dirtied, its leaves bent and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still uttering words.

A City Under Bombardment

Two days prior, rockets began striking the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, violent explosions. The digital network was completely severed. I was in my flat, rendering a book about what it means to carry language across tongues, and the morals and concerns of taking on a different narrative. As edifices collapsed, I sat polishing a text that argued, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything ceased. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to publish was halted when the facility ceased operations. Retailers shut one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the library in my apartment, holding dictionaries, rare editions I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That library was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Distance and Loss

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous areas – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a photo: in the distance, a plant was burning, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and danger seemed to chase them.

During those days, feelings moved through the city like a front: sudden dread, anxiety, indignation at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and materials that translation demands.

Outside, blast waves tore windows from their frames; at a relative's house, every pane was destroyed, the furniture lay ruined, household items scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, painting at an easel, choosing not to let silence and debris have the last word.

Converting Sorrow

A photograph circulated online of a young poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral alongside her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an older woman running between passages, shouting a name. People said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: turning devastation into image, death into poetry, mourning into longing.

The Craft as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of devastation, I found myself translating a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet kept working until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all longed for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than an art form: it was an act of resistance, of remaining, of enduring.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his prison cell, asking for more books, insisting that language study become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, aspiration, rigor, support, and symbol” all at once.

An Enduring Legacy

And then came the photograph. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, damaged but intact, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been black and white, drained of life among the rubble and debris. 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 complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, 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 remain when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, unyielding rejection to disappear.