Amid the Bombed-Out Remains of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Volume I’d Translated

Among the debris of a fallen building, a particular image lingered with me: a volume I had converted from the English language to Farsi, sitting half-buried in dust and ash. Its front was torn and dirtied, its leaves curled and scorched, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking.

A Metropolis Under Bombardment

Two days prior, missiles started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, powerful explosions. The internet was completely disconnected. I was in my apartment, working on a work about what it means to move text across tongues, and the principles and concerns of inhabiting another’s perspective. As buildings came down, I sat editing a text that contended, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything halted. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to publish was halted when the printing house ceased operations. Shops locked their doors one by one. One night, when the blasts were too nearby, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop worrying about the library in my apartment, holding lexicons, valuable editions I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my career'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 more secure locations – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a picture: in the background, a factory was burning, dark smoke coiling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to chase them.

During those days, feelings moved through the city like a storm: sudden dread, anxiety, righteous anger at the wrong, then apathy. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate searches and references that the craft demands.

Outside, blast waves tore windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every window was shattered, the possessions lay ruined, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, painting at an easel, declining to let stillness and dirt have the final say.

Transforming Grief

A photograph spread on social media of a 23-year-old writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her poem went spread rapidly alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman dashing between alleys, calling a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some repressed remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: transforming devastation into art, demise into poetry, sorrow into longing.

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of ruin, I found myself working on a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet kept 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 pursuing.

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

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his cell, asking for more resources, insisting that language study become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, hope, practice, support, and symbol” all at once.

A Marked Work

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 translations, damaged but intact, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, stripped 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 looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a act with consequences”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else crumbles. It is a subtle, determined declination to disappear.