Within those Bombed-Out Remains of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Book I’d Translated

Among the wreckage of a fallen building, a particular vision remained with me: a volume I had translated from the English language to Persian, sitting half-buried in dust and ash. Its jacket was torn and stained, its sheets bent and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating.

A City Under Bombardment

Two days before, missiles commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just sudden, powerful blasts. The web was entirely disconnected. I was in my residence, rendering a book about what it means to transport text across cultures, and the morals and anxieties of taking on a different voice. As structures came down, I sat revising a text that contended, in its subtle way, for the endurance of meaning.

Everything halted. A project my publishing house had been about to send to press was stuck when the facility closed. Bookstores shut one by one. One night, when the explosions were too close, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, valuable books I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Distance and Grief

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure locations – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a photo: in the background, a factory was burning, black smoke curling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like weather: sudden dread, unease, moral outrage at the wrong, then apathy. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate queries and references that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their frames; at a relative's house, every pane was shattered, the furniture lay damaged, personal effects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, painting at an stand, choosing not to let quiet and dirt have the final say.

Transforming Sorrow

A photograph spread digitally of a young writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman running between passages, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some deep-seated memory. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: turning ruin into picture, death into lines, sorrow into longing.

The Work as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of 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 experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted producing until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all longed for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond literary craft: it was an act of defiance, of remaining, of enduring.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his confinement, asking for more books, insisting that translation become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, goal, discipline, support, and symbol” all at once.

A Marked Legacy

And then came the photograph. I saw it on a platform and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, scarred but whole, my name printed on the cover. The image was in colour, 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 unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but enduring.

I stared 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 bombardment, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else disappears. It is a subtle, unyielding rejection to vanish.