Amid those Bombed-Out Remains of an Residential Building, I Saw a Book I Had Translated

Within the debris of a collapsed building, a particular image lingered with me: a volume I had converted from the English language to Persian, sitting half-buried in dust and soot. Its jacket was ripped and smudged, its sheets bent and scorched, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating.

A City During Bombardment

Two days prior, missiles started hitting the city. There were no sirens, just abrupt, violent blasts. The internet was entirely severed. I was in my residence, rendering a book about what it means to carry language across tongues, and the ethics and worries of inhabiting someone else's voice. As buildings collapsed, I sat revising a text that suggested, in its subtle way, for the endurance of meaning.

Everything ceased. A manuscript my publisher had been about to send to press was stuck when the facility ceased operations. Shops shut one by one. One night, when the booms were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop thinking about the library in my apartment, holding dictionaries, rare books I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That library was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Distance and Devastation

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous areas – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a picture: in the faraway, a industrial site was on fire, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly far away, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like weather: swift dread, unease, righteous anger at the injustice, then apathy. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate queries and sources that translation demands.

Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their casings; at a family member's house, every pane was destroyed, the furniture lay ruined, personal effects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an stand, declining to let stillness and debris have the last word.

Transforming Pain

A photograph circulated on social media of a young writer who was died when missiles struck a building. Her poem went viral with her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an older woman dashing between alleyways, yelling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some deep-seated remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: turning ruin into picture, loss into poetry, grief into search.

Translation as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself rendering a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound 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 reaching for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all longed for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond a skill: it was an act of defiance, of staying put, of holding on.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his prison cell, asking for more resources, insisting that language study become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, aspiration, discipline, anchor, and metaphor” all at once.

A Marked Work

And then came the image. I spotted it on a platform and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, damaged but intact, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, drained 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 apparent – scarred, but enduring.

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 bombardment, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else falls away. It is a persistent, stubborn declination to vanish.