Among the Devastated Debris of an Residential Building, I Found a Book I’d Translated

Among the debris of a fallen apartment block, a single vision lingered with me: a volume I had rendered from English to Persian, sitting partly concealed in dirt and ash. Its front was shredded and smudged, its sheets bent and scorched, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating.

A Metropolis During Attack

Two days before, missiles commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, forceful explosions. The internet was entirely severed. I was in my apartment, working on a book about what it means to move words across cultures, and the principles and anxieties of inhabiting someone else's narrative. As buildings collapsed, I sat editing a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the persistence of purpose.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to send to press was stranded when the printing house shut down. Shops shut one by one. One night, when the explosions 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 volumes I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Separation and Grief

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure towns – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a image: in the background, a industrial site was burning, dark smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions moved through the city like weather: instant terror, apprehension, moral outrage at the wrong, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick look-ups and references that the craft demands.

Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their frames; at a relative's house, every pane was shattered, the belongings lay ruined, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an easel, declining to let quiet and dust have the ultimate victory.

Translating Pain

A picture circulated digitally of a young poet who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her poem went spread rapidly next to her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an older 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 awakened some repressed recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: transforming destruction into art, demise into lines, sorrow into quest.

Translation as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by ruin, I found myself translating a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet kept producing until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all longed for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than an art form: it was an act of perseverance, of staying put, of holding on.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his cell, asking for more resources, insisting that language study become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, aspiration, practice, support, and symbol” all at once.

A Marked Work

And then came the photograph. I noticed it on a platform and saw that, within 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 black and white, 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 enduring.

I gazed upon 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 attack, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else disappears. It is a persistent, unyielding refusal to be silenced.