Among the Bombed-Out Remains of an Apartment Block, I Found a Volume I Had Rendered

Within the wreckage of a fallen building, a particular image stayed with me: a tome I had translated from the English language to Farsi, sitting partially covered in dust and ash. Its cover was ripped and smudged, its leaves bent and burned, but it was still legible. Still speaking.

An Urban Center Under Bombardment

Two days before, missiles commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, forceful explosions. The web was entirely severed. I was in my flat, translating a book about what it means to carry text across cultures, and the morals and worries of inhabiting someone else's voice. As edifices fell, I sat editing a text that contended, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of significance.

Everything halted. A manuscript my publisher had been about to publish was stuck when the printing house shut down. Retailers shut one by one. One night, when the booms were too close, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the bookshelves in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, valuable editions I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That library was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Separation and Devastation

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous locations – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a photo: in the distance, a industrial site was on fire, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to follow them.

During those days, feelings moved through the city like a front: sudden terror, apprehension, indignation at the injustice, then apathy. Beyond the personal impact, the bombardment eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate queries and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, blast waves ripped windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every pane was shattered, the furniture lay broken, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an easel, choosing not to let quiet and debris have the ultimate victory.

Transforming Sorrow

A image spread digitally of a 23-year-old writer who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral with her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman running between alleys, calling a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some buried memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: turning ruin into art, demise into poetry, grief into search.

Translation as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself rendering 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 experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted creating until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than an art form: it was an act of perseverance, of remaining, of holding on.

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

A Marked Work

And then came the image. I spotted it on a platform and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, marked but whole, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, drained of life among the rubble and ruins. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but surviving.

I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a act with consequences”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under fire, 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 falls away. It is a persistent, unyielding rejection to be silenced.