Amid those Bombed-Out Remains of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Volume I Had Translated

Among the rubble of a fallen building, a particular sight lingered with me: a book I had translated from the English language to Persian, lying partially covered in dust and soot. Its cover was torn and dirtied, its pages curled and singed, but it was still readable. Still communicating.

A Metropolis Under Assault

Two days earlier, missiles began striking the city. There were no alarms, just sudden, powerful explosions. The internet was completely disconnected. I was in my apartment, translating a text about what it means to move text across cultures, and the ethics and anxieties of inhabiting another’s perspective. As structures came down, I sat revising a text that contended, in its subtle way, for the endurance of purpose.

Everything stopped. A book my publisher had been about to publish was halted when the printing house ceased operations. Bookstores closed one by one. One night, when the booms were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop thinking about the bookshelves in my apartment, filled with reference books, rare books I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Separation and Grief

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be safer 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 factory was burning, dark smoke spiraling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and danger seemed to chase them.

During those days, emotions moved through the city like a front: sudden terror, unease, indignation at the unfairness, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the attack eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was destroyed, the belongings lay broken, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an easel, refusing to let stillness and debris have the final say.

Translating Grief

A photograph circulated digitally of a 23-year-old writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly alongside her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an older woman running between passages, yelling a name. People said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some repressed recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: changing devastation into image, loss into lines, grief into quest.

The Work as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by ruin, I found myself rendering a fable about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet kept working until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all desired – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth reaching toward.

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

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

An Enduring Work

And then came the picture. I saw it on a news site and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, marked but whole, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been devoid of color, drained of life among the concrete and ruins. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but surviving.

I looked 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 forgotten. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else falls away. It is a persistent, unyielding rejection to be silenced.