Among the Devastated Remains of an Residential Building, I Found a Volume I’d Translated

Among the wreckage of a fallen building, a single sight stayed with me: a volume I had translated from English to Farsi, resting partly concealed in dirt and ash. Its front was shredded and stained, its pages curled and burned, but it was still readable. Still communicating.

An Urban Center During Attack

Two days before, rockets started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, powerful explosions. The web was entirely disconnected. I was in my flat, translating a book about what it means to transport language across tongues, and the ethics and worries of occupying someone else's voice. As buildings fell, I sat editing a text that contended, in its understated way, for the endurance of purpose.

Everything halted. A manuscript my publisher had been about to send to press was stranded when the facility ceased operations. Shops locked their doors one by one. One night, when the booms were too imminent, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, holding dictionaries, rare books I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Distance and Loss

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure areas – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a image: in the distance, a industrial site was burning, dark smoke spiraling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and threat seemed to chase them.

During those days, feelings moved through the city like a storm: sudden terror, unease, moral outrage at the wrong, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, blast waves tore windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every window was destroyed, the belongings lay broken, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, creating at an easel, choosing not to let stillness and debris have the final say.

Transforming Sorrow

A photograph spread digitally of a young poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her poem went spread rapidly alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman hurrying between passages, yelling a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some repressed recollection. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: changing destruction into image, loss into lines, sorrow into longing.

The Work as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of destruction, I found myself rendering a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted working until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all yearned for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than an art form: it was an act of resistance, of staying put, of holding on.

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

A Scarred Work

And then came the photograph. I spotted it on a platform and saw that, amid 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 colour, but it might as well have been devoid of color, stripped of life among the concrete and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been invisible, 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 complete significance 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 falls away. It is a subtle, determined refusal to vanish.