Amid those Ruined Debris of an Residential Building, I Saw a Book I’d Translated

Within the rubble of a collapsed structure, a single image remained with me: a volume I had rendered from the English language to Persian, sitting half-buried in dirt and soot. Its jacket was torn and smudged, its leaves curled and scorched, but it was still legible. Still speaking.

A Metropolis Under Assault

Two days earlier, projectiles started hitting the city. There were no sirens, just abrupt, powerful detonations. The web was totally disconnected. I was in my residence, translating a book about what it means to transport language across tongues, and the ethics and anxieties of occupying another’s voice. As structures collapsed, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the persistence of significance.

Everything halted. A book my publisher had been about to publish was stranded when the facility ceased operations. Retailers closed one by one. One night, when the explosions were too nearby, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the bookshelves in my apartment, holding reference books, rare books I had spent years collecting 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.

Separation and Loss

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure towns – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a picture: in the faraway, a plant was burning, thick smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods moved through the city like a front: swift terror, unease, indignation at the unfairness, then detachment. Beyond the personal impact, the attack destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate searches and references that translation demands.

Outside, concussive forces ripped windows from their sashes; at a family member's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the furniture lay broken, objects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, painting at an easel, declining to let silence and dust have the ultimate victory.

Transforming Sorrow

A picture was shared online of a young poet who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an aged woman running between alleyways, calling a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some buried memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

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

Translation as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself working on a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet kept working until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all yearned for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than literary craft: it was an act of perseverance, of remaining, of persisting.

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

A Scarred Legacy

And then came the photograph. I saw it on a website and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, marked but intact, my name printed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been black and white, drained of life among the debris 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 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 fire, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, determined refusal to disappear.