Among the Bombed-Out Debris of an Residential Building, I Saw a Book I’d Translated

In the rubble of a fallen building, a solitary vision stayed with me: a book I had converted from the English language to Persian, sitting half-buried in dirt and soot. Its cover was torn and stained, its pages bent and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating.

A City Amid Assault

Two days before, rockets started hitting the city. There were no sirens, just unexpected, powerful detonations. The internet was totally disconnected. I was in my apartment, rendering a book about what it means to transport words across cultures, and the ethics and worries of occupying a different perspective. As structures came down, I sat polishing a text that argued, in its quiet way, for the endurance of meaning.

Everything halted. A book my publishing house had been about to go to print was stuck when the printer closed. Bookstores locked their doors one by one. One night, when the explosions were too imminent, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the bookshelves in my apartment, filled with reference books, hard-to-find books I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my lifework, 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 less dangerous areas – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a picture: in the background, a plant was ablaze, dark smoke spiraling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly somewhere else, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like a front: sudden terror, apprehension, moral outrage at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the emotional toll, the shelling eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and materials that translation demands.

Outside, concussive forces blew windows from their sashes; at a relative's house, every sheet of glass was destroyed, the belongings lay damaged, household items scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, creating at an easel, choosing not to let silence and debris have the last word.

Translating Sorrow

A picture spread digitally of a young artist who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her poem went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an older woman dashing between alleys, shouting a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some buried remembrance. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: changing ruin into art, loss into verse, sorrow into quest.

Translation as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself translating a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will heal 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 persisted producing until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward.

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

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his confinement, asking for more books, insisting that language study become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, aspiration, rigor, support, and symbol” all at once.

A Marked Voice

And then came the image. I saw it on a news site and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, marked but intact, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, 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 seen – scarred, but enduring.

I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a political act”, but I had never felt the true gravity 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 transport stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, unyielding refusal to disappear.