Within the Bombed-Out Remains of an Residential Building, I Saw a Book I Had Rendered

Within the debris of a fallen apartment block, a particular sight remained with me: a volume I had translated from the English language to Farsi, sitting partially covered in dust and soot. Its front was torn and stained, its leaves bent and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still uttering words.

An Urban Center Amid Bombardment

Two days earlier, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, powerful detonations. The web was completely cut off. I was in my apartment, translating a text about what it means to transport text across tongues, and the ethics and worries of inhabiting another’s perspective. As structures came down, I sat revising a text that suggested, in its quiet way, for the persistence of meaning.

Everything halted. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to publish was stranded when the facility ceased operations. Shops shut one by one. One night, when the explosions were too close, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, hard-to-find editions I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Dispersal and Devastation

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure locations – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a picture: in the distance, a factory was ablaze, thick smoke coiling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, moods passed over the city like weather: swift terror, apprehension, moral outrage at the wrong, then apathy. Beyond the emotional toll, the attack destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and references that the work demands.

Outside, blast waves ripped windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every window was broken, the belongings lay ruined, personal effects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an stand, declining to let silence and dust have the ultimate victory.

Converting Sorrow

A picture was shared digitally of a 23-year-old artist who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared with her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an elderly woman dashing between alleyways, calling a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some buried recollection. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: transforming devastation into picture, demise into poetry, grief into search.

Translation as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself translating a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will heal 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 continued creating 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 pursuing.

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

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a facility; 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 reality, hope, practice, anchor, and symbol” all at once.

A Scarred Work

And then came the image. I saw it on a website and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, damaged but intact, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been black and white, devoid of life among the concrete and ruins. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but enduring.

I stared at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a political act”, but I had never felt the complete significance 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 endure when everything else falls away. It is a subtle, unyielding rejection to be silenced.