Among those Bombed-Out Remains of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Volume I Had Translated

Within the wreckage of a destroyed structure, a single sight lingered with me: a book I had converted from the English language to Farsi, resting partially covered in dirt and soot. Its jacket was shredded and dirtied, its leaves bent and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating.

An Urban Center During Bombardment

Two days prior, rockets commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, powerful explosions. The digital network was entirely cut off. I was in my residence, rendering a work about what it means to move language across tongues, and the ethics and concerns of inhabiting someone else's narrative. As edifices came down, I sat revising a text that contended, in its understated way, for the persistence of meaning.

Everything ceased. A project my publisher had been about to send to press was stranded when the printing house closed. Retailers 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 dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, valuable books I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That library was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Dispersal and Grief

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be safer locations – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a photo: in the faraway, a industrial site was on fire, dark smoke coiling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to chase them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like a front: swift terror, apprehension, righteous anger at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the bombardment destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick queries and sources that the work demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every pane was destroyed, the furniture lay ruined, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an stand, choosing not to let silence and dirt have the last word.

Converting Pain

A picture was shared on social media of a 23-year-old artist who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her writing went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an older woman running between alleyways, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some buried remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: turning destruction into art, death into poetry, grief into search.

Translation as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still amidst destruction, I found myself working on a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will get better 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 persisted 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 reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond an art form: it was an act of perseverance, of staying put, of persisting.

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

An Enduring Legacy

And then came the image. I noticed it on a website and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, marked but surviving, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, stripped of life among the concrete and debris. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but surviving.

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 true gravity 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 remain when everything else falls away. It is a persistent, unyielding refusal to be silenced.