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

In the rubble of a destroyed structure, a solitary sight remained with me: a tome I had converted from English to Farsi, lying partially covered in dirt and ash. Its front was ripped and smudged, its pages curled and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating.

A City During Bombardment

Two days prior, projectiles started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, powerful detonations. The internet was completely cut off. I was in my residence, working on a text about what it means to transport language across languages, and the principles and concerns of inhabiting another’s narrative. As structures came down, I sat revising a text that contended, in its quiet way, for the persistence of meaning.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publisher had been about to publish was stranded when the printing house ceased operations. Bookstores locked their doors one by one. One night, when the explosions were too nearby, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, holding reference books, rare editions I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That library was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Dispersal and Loss

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure locations – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a image: in the background, a plant was ablaze, dark smoke spiraling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and peril seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like a front: swift fear, unease, righteous anger at the wrong, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the bombardment eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant look-ups and sources that the craft demands.

Outside, blast waves tore windows from their sashes; at a relative's house, every pane was destroyed, the furniture lay damaged, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, painting at an easel, choosing not to let stillness and debris have the ultimate victory.

Translating Pain

A photograph was shared on social media of a 23-year-old poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman hurrying between alleyways, calling a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some deep-seated memory. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: turning devastation into image, demise into verse, sorrow into longing.

The Craft as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself rendering a story for young readers 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 lost his sight yet kept working 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 impossible, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than a skill: it was an act of resistance, of remaining, of persisting.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his confinement, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that linguistic work become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, hope, practice, support, and analogy” all at once.

An Enduring Voice

And then came the picture. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, damaged but intact, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, stripped of life among the debris and wreckage. 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 statement”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice had significance”. 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 quiet, stubborn rejection to be silenced.