Among those Bombed-Out Remains of an Residential Building, I Saw a Volume I’d Translated

Within the rubble of a destroyed apartment block, a particular vision lingered with me: a volume I had rendered from the English language to Farsi, sitting partly concealed in dust and soot. Its jacket was ripped and smudged, its pages bent and scorched, but it was still decipherable. Still uttering words.

An Urban Center During Assault

Two days prior, projectiles started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just sudden, forceful detonations. The digital network was totally severed. I was in my residence, translating a work about what it means to carry language across languages, and the morals and worries of inhabiting a different perspective. As buildings collapsed, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything halted. A book my publishing house had been about to send to press was stranded when the printing house closed. Bookstores shut one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop worrying about the library in my apartment, filled with lexicons, hard-to-find editions I had spent years gathering 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 endure the night.

Distance and Loss

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be safer towns – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the distance, a plant was ablaze, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and threat seemed to pursue them.

During those days, feelings swept through the city like a storm: sudden terror, unease, moral outrage at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the emotional toll, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick searches and references that translation demands.

Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their sashes; at a family member's house, every window was shattered, the possessions lay ruined, personal effects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, painting at an stand, declining to let quiet and dirt have the last word.

Converting Pain

A photograph was shared on social media of a young artist who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman running between passages, shouting a name. People said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some repressed recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: changing destruction into art, demise into lines, grief into longing.

The Craft as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of devastation, I found myself working on a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant 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 aiming at the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all desired – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than literary craft: it was an act of perseverance, of holding one's ground, of persisting.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher 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, aspiration, discipline, support, and symbol” all at once.

A Marked Legacy

And then came the image. I saw it on a news site and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, damaged but surviving, my name printed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been black and white, stripped of life among the debris and debris. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but persisting.

I stared at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a act with consequences”, but I had never felt the full weight of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else falls away. It is a subtle, determined refusal to disappear.