Among those Ruined Remains of an Residential Building, I Found a Book I’d Translated

In the rubble of a collapsed apartment block, a single vision remained with me: a book I had converted from English to Persian, resting partially covered in dirt and ash. Its front was shredded and stained, its sheets bent and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking.

A City Under Bombardment

Two days prior, rockets commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, forceful blasts. The digital network was completely severed. I was in my residence, rendering a book about what it means to transport language across languages, and the principles and anxieties of taking on someone else's voice. As structures fell, I sat editing a text that suggested, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything stopped. A book my publisher had been about to go to print was stuck when the printing house closed. Retailers shut one by one. One night, when the blasts were too nearby, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop worrying about the library in my apartment, stocked with lexicons, hard-to-find volumes I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my life's work, 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 hit. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a picture: in the faraway, a industrial site was burning, thick smoke spiraling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly somewhere else, and danger seemed to pursue them.

During those days, emotions moved through the city like weather: instant fear, apprehension, indignation at the wrong, then detachment. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick queries and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was destroyed, the furniture lay damaged, personal effects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, painting at an stand, refusing to let quiet and dirt have the final say.

Transforming Pain

A image was shared digitally of a 23-year-old poet who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her poem went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an older woman running between alleys, shouting a name. People said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some repressed recollection. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: turning destruction into image, demise into lines, mourning into longing.

Translation as Defiance

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 grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet continued creating until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all yearned for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond a skill: it was an act of perseverance, of holding one's ground, of persisting.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his confinement, asking for more resources, insisting that language study become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, hope, rigor, anchor, and metaphor” all at once.

A Marked Voice

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

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 attack, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else disappears. It is a persistent, determined rejection to be silenced.