Within the Bombed-Out Remains of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Book I Had Translated

Within the debris of a collapsed apartment block, a single image lingered with me: a volume I had rendered from the English language to Farsi, sitting partly concealed in dirt and ash. Its cover was torn and smudged, its pages bent and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating.

A Metropolis Under Attack

Two days before, projectiles started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just sudden, powerful explosions. The web was entirely disconnected. I was in my apartment, rendering a work about what it means to carry words across tongues, and the principles and anxieties of occupying another’s perspective. As buildings came down, I sat polishing a text that contended, in its subtle way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything ceased. A book my publishing house had been about to go to print was stuck when the printer closed. Shops closed one by one. One night, when the explosions were too close, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop thinking about the library in my apartment, holding reference books, hard-to-find volumes I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Dispersal and Grief

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure locations – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the distance, a plant was burning, black smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and danger seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods passed over the city like a storm: sudden terror, apprehension, indignation at the unfairness, then detachment. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick searches and references that the craft demands.

Outside, blast waves tore windows from their sashes; at a relative's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the furniture lay broken, objects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an stand, refusing to let silence and debris have the final say.

Translating Pain

A picture circulated online of a young writer who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an older woman running between passages, yelling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some deep-seated memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: changing ruin into art, demise into lines, grief into quest.

The Craft as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of destruction, I found myself working on a fable about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet kept creating until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all yearned for – seemingly unattainable, 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 remaining, of holding on.

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

A Marked Legacy

And then came the picture. I saw it on a website and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, marked but surviving, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, devoid of life among the concrete and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but surviving.

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 full weight of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, stubborn declination to be silenced.