Within the Devastated Debris of an Residential Building, I Found a Volume I Had Translated

Within the debris of a collapsed building, a solitary sight remained with me: a volume I had translated from the English language to Farsi, lying partially covered in dirt and ash. Its jacket was torn and smudged, its leaves curled and singed, but it was still legible. Still communicating.

An Urban Center Under Attack

Two days before, rockets began striking the city. There were no warnings, just sudden, violent detonations. The digital network was completely severed. I was in my residence, rendering a work about what it means to transport text across languages, and the morals and anxieties of inhabiting another’s voice. As buildings collapsed, I sat revising a text that suggested, in its subtle way, for the persistence of purpose.

Everything ceased. A project my publisher had been about to publish was stuck when the printing house closed. Bookstores locked their doors one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the bookshelves in my apartment, holding dictionaries, rare volumes I had spent years collecting 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.

Distance and Grief

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous areas – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the distance, a plant was on fire, thick smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to chase them.

During those days, emotions moved through the city like a storm: instant dread, anxiety, indignation at the unfairness, then detachment. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick queries and materials that translation demands.

Outside, blast waves blew windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every pane was destroyed, the possessions lay broken, objects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, painting at an stand, declining to let silence and debris have the ultimate victory.

Translating Grief

A photograph circulated digitally of a 23-year-old poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went was widely shared with her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman running between alleys, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some deep-seated recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

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

Translation as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still amidst ruin, I found myself working on a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep 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 unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all desired – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than a skill: it was an act of resistance, of staying put, of enduring.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his prison cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that translation become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, hope, rigor, support, and symbol” all at once.

An Enduring Work

And then came the picture. I spotted it on a platform and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, marked but surviving, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, 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 apparent – scarred, but persisting.

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 fire, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else falls away. It is a subtle, stubborn declination to be silenced.