Within those Bombed-Out Debris of an Residential Building, I Saw a Volume I’d Translated

Among the wreckage of a fallen building, a particular sight remained with me: a volume I had translated from the English language to Persian, sitting partially covered in dirt and ash. Its front was ripped and stained, its sheets curled and singed, but it was still readable. Still uttering words.

A Metropolis During Bombardment

Two days prior, rockets began striking the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, forceful detonations. The web was entirely severed. I was in my flat, working on a book about what it means to move words across tongues, and the ethics and anxieties of inhabiting another’s narrative. As buildings came down, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its subtle way, for the persistence of meaning.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to go to print was halted when the facility ceased operations. Bookstores shut one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, holding lexicons, rare books I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That library was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Distance and Loss

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous areas – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a photo: in the background, a plant was burning, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and danger seemed to pursue them.

During those days, moods moved through the city like weather: sudden fear, unease, indignation at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the psychological cost, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick queries and materials that translation demands.

Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their frames; at a relative's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the furniture lay damaged, objects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, painting at an stand, refusing to let silence and dust have the ultimate victory.

Converting Grief

A picture spread digitally of a 23-year-old poet who was died when missiles struck a building. Her poem went was widely shared next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman hurrying between alleys, yelling a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some repressed recollection. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: transforming devastation into image, death into lines, sorrow into quest.

The Work as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of ruin, I found myself rendering a fable 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 experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted creating until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all longed for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than literary craft: it was an act of resistance, of remaining, of holding on.

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

A Scarred Voice

And then came the picture. I spotted it on a website and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, damaged but intact, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been devoid of color, stripped of life among the concrete and debris. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – 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 full weight of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else falls away. It is a subtle, stubborn declination to vanish.