Among the Bombed-Out Debris of an Residential Building, I Found a Volume I Had Translated

Among the wreckage of a collapsed building, a single image remained with me: a volume I had rendered from English to Farsi, sitting partially covered in dust and ash. Its front was torn and stained, its pages bent and singed, but it was still legible. Still speaking.

An Urban Center Under Attack

Two days before, missiles began striking the city. There were no sirens, just unexpected, powerful blasts. The internet was entirely cut off. I was in my apartment, translating a work about what it means to carry text across languages, and the principles and anxieties of inhabiting another’s voice. As structures fell, I sat editing a text that contended, in its understated way, for the endurance of meaning.

Everything ceased. A book my publisher had been about to publish was halted when the printing house ceased operations. Retailers locked their doors one by one. One night, when the booms were too close, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, filled with lexicons, hard-to-find books I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Separation and Devastation

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be safer areas – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a photo: in the faraway, a industrial site was burning, thick smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, moods swept through the city like weather: sudden dread, unease, indignation at the wrong, then apathy. Beyond the emotional toll, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate searches and sources that the craft demands.

Outside, shockwaves ripped windows from their sashes; at a family member's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the possessions lay damaged, objects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, creating at an stand, choosing not to let quiet and dust have the last word.

Translating Sorrow

A picture was shared online of a young poet who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her writing went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an elderly woman hurrying between alleyways, calling a name. People said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried memory. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: transforming destruction into art, loss into verse, grief into longing.

Translation as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself rendering a fable about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet kept creating until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth pursuing.

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

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

A Marked Voice

And then came the image. I saw it on a website and saw that, among 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, drained of life among the debris and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – 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 bombardment, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else falls away. It is a quiet, unyielding refusal to be silenced.