Within the Bombed-Out Debris of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Volume I Had Translated

Within the wreckage of a collapsed apartment block, a single image remained with me: a volume I had rendered from the English language to Persian, sitting half-buried in dust and soot. Its jacket was torn and stained, its leaves curled and burned, but it was still readable. Still uttering words.

A Metropolis Under Bombardment

Two days prior, rockets began striking the city. There were no alarms, just sudden, violent explosions. The digital network was entirely severed. I was in my residence, working on a book about what it means to transport language across tongues, and the morals and worries of taking on a different perspective. As buildings came down, I sat polishing a text that argued, in its understated way, for the persistence of meaning.

Everything halted. A project my publishing house had been about to publish was stranded when the printing house closed. Bookstores locked their doors one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop thinking about the bookshelves in my apartment, holding dictionaries, hard-to-find volumes I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Distance and Loss

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure areas – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a plant was ablaze, black smoke curling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to follow them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like a storm: sudden dread, apprehension, righteous anger at the injustice, then detachment. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and sources that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces ripped windows from their casings; at a relative's house, every pane was destroyed, the belongings lay ruined, personal effects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an stand, choosing not to let quiet and dirt have the final say.

Converting Pain

A image was shared on social media of a 23-year-old artist who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her poem went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an elderly woman hurrying between alleys, shouting a name. People said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: changing ruin into image, loss into lines, mourning into quest.

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of ruin, 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 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 reaching for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all desired – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than a skill: it was an act of defiance, of holding one's ground, of enduring.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his cell, asking for more books, insisting that linguistic work become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, aspiration, discipline, foundation, and symbol” all at once.

An Enduring Voice

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

I looked 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 fire, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, unyielding refusal to be silenced.