Among the Ruined Remains of an Residential Building, I Found a Volume I’d Rendered

In the wreckage of a destroyed apartment block, a solitary image lingered with me: a book I had translated from the English language to Farsi, lying partly concealed in dirt and soot. Its jacket was ripped and smudged, its pages curled and singed, but it was still legible. Still speaking.

A City During Bombardment

Two days prior, missiles began striking the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, violent detonations. The internet was entirely cut off. I was in my flat, translating a work about what it means to carry text across languages, and the ethics and concerns of taking on someone else's narrative. As buildings fell, I sat revising a text that argued, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything ceased. A project my publishing house had been about to go to print was stranded when the facility shut down. Retailers shut one by one. One night, when the explosions were too nearby, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, holding reference books, rare books I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That library was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Dispersal and Devastation

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be safer areas – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a photo: in the distance, a plant was on fire, thick smoke spiraling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, emotions passed over the city like a front: instant terror, anxiety, righteous anger at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate queries and references that translation demands.

Outside, blast waves ripped windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every window was destroyed, the belongings lay ruined, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an easel, choosing not to let silence and debris have the last word.

Transforming Pain

A picture circulated online of a young artist who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her verse went viral with her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman dashing between passages, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some repressed memory. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: turning devastation into image, loss into lines, sorrow into longing.

Translation as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst destruction, I found myself working on a fable about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet kept creating until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all desired – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than literary craft: it was an act of resistance, of holding one's ground, of enduring.

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 books, insisting that translation become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, goal, discipline, anchor, and analogy” all at once.

A Marked Voice

And then came the photograph. I noticed it on a news site and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, damaged but intact, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, stripped of life among the rubble and ruins. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but persisting.

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 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 haul stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, unyielding refusal to be silenced.