Among those Bombed-Out Debris of an Residential Building, I Saw a Book I Had Translated

Within the wreckage of a destroyed building, a particular image lingered with me: a volume I had rendered from English to Persian, lying half-buried in dirt and soot. Its cover was shredded and smudged, its sheets curled and burned, but it was still legible. Still speaking.

An Urban Center During Bombardment

Two days earlier, missiles commenced attacking the city. There were no sirens, just abrupt, powerful blasts. The web was totally disconnected. I was in my flat, translating a work about what it means to move words across tongues, and the morals and concerns of occupying another’s perspective. As edifices collapsed, I sat polishing a text that contended, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything stopped. A book my publishing house had been about to go to print was halted when the facility shut down. Retailers shut one by one. One night, when the blasts were too nearby, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the shelves in my apartment, filled with lexicons, hard-to-find volumes I had spent years collecting 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 make it through the night.

Dispersal and Grief

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure towns – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a industrial site was ablaze, black smoke coiling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to chase them.

During those days, emotions moved through the city like weather: sudden dread, unease, indignation at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate queries and sources that the work demands.

Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every pane was broken, the belongings lay broken, objects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an easel, choosing not to let silence and dust have the final say.

Translating Grief

A image circulated online of a 23-year-old artist 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 elderly woman running between alleyways, shouting a name. People said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some buried recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

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

The Craft as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself rendering a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet continued producing until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all desired – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond an art form: it was an act of perseverance, of remaining, of persisting.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his cell, asking for more books, insisting that language study become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, goal, practice, anchor, and symbol” all at once.

A Marked Voice

And then came the photograph. I saw it on a website and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, scarred but intact, my name printed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been devoid of color, stripped of life among the debris and debris. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but surviving.

I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a political act”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, unyielding rejection to be silenced.