Among the Bombed-Out Remains of an Residential Building, I Found a Book I Had Translated

Within the rubble of a collapsed structure, a particular vision lingered with me: a volume I had translated from the English language to Persian, lying partly concealed in dirt and ash. Its cover was shredded and smudged, its leaves bent and scorched, but it was still decipherable. Still uttering words.

A City Amid Bombardment

Two days prior, rockets commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just sudden, powerful explosions. The digital network was completely severed. I was in my residence, rendering a text about what it means to move words across tongues, and the morals and worries of taking on a different narrative. As buildings collapsed, I sat polishing a text that contended, in its subtle way, for the persistence of significance.

Everything halted. A manuscript my publisher had been about to publish was halted when the printer closed. Shops locked their doors one by one. One night, when the explosions were too imminent, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, filled with reference books, rare editions I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure 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 struck. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a picture: in the faraway, a factory was ablaze, dark smoke spiraling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to pursue them.

During those days, emotions moved through the city like a storm: swift terror, apprehension, indignation at the unfairness, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick searches and sources that translation demands.

Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their casings; at a family member's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the belongings lay broken, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, creating at an stand, declining to let quiet and debris have the final say.

Translating Sorrow

A picture spread on social media of a 23-year-old writer who was died 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 elderly woman dashing between passages, shouting a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some buried remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: changing destruction into picture, loss into lines, sorrow into search.

The Work as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by ruin, I found myself rendering a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound 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 striving for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all longed for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than literary craft: 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 leader in his prison cell, asking for more books, insisting that translation become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, aspiration, rigor, support, and symbol” all at once.

An Enduring Voice

And then came the picture. I saw it on a news site and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, scarred but whole, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, devoid 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 seen – scarred, but surviving.

I gazed upon 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 had significance”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else falls away. It is a subtle, stubborn rejection to disappear.