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

Among the debris of a fallen apartment block, a solitary vision lingered with me: a book I had translated from English to Farsi, sitting partly concealed in dirt and soot. Its front was shredded and stained, its pages bent and burned, but it was still legible. Still communicating.

An Urban Center Amid Attack

Two days before, rockets began striking the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, forceful blasts. The internet was entirely severed. I was in my residence, working on a book about what it means to move text across cultures, and the morals and concerns of occupying another’s narrative. As edifices came down, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the endurance of purpose.

Everything stopped. A project my publishing house had been about to go to print was stranded when the printing house ceased operations. Shops closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the bookshelves in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, rare volumes I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Distance and Devastation

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be safer areas – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a plant was ablaze, dark smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like a storm: instant dread, apprehension, moral outrage at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the emotional toll, the shelling eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and references that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces ripped windows from their casings; at a relative's house, every window was broken, the possessions lay damaged, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an stand, declining to let quiet and debris have the ultimate victory.

Transforming Sorrow

A image was shared online of a young writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her poem went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an elderly woman running between passages, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried remembrance. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: transforming devastation into image, death into lines, mourning into longing.

The Work as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst devastation, 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 deep meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet continued working until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all desired – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than literary craft: it was an act of perseverance, of staying put, 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 confinement, asking for more books, insisting that linguistic work become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, hope, rigor, foundation, and analogy” all at once.

A Marked Work

And then came the picture. I saw it on a website and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, scarred but whole, 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 wreckage. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – 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 full weight of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, stubborn declination to disappear.