Among those Bombed-Out Remains of an Apartment Block, I Found a Volume I’d Translated

In the debris of a collapsed building, a single vision stayed with me: a book I had converted from English to Farsi, lying partly concealed in dirt and soot. Its jacket was shredded and smudged, its sheets bent and scorched, but it was still legible. Still speaking.

A City Amid Assault

Two days before, missiles started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just sudden, forceful detonations. The internet was entirely disconnected. I was in my apartment, translating a work about what it means to carry words across tongues, and the morals and concerns of occupying another’s narrative. As buildings came down, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its quiet way, for the persistence of purpose.

Everything halted. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to publish was stranded when the facility ceased operations. Bookstores locked their doors one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the library in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, rare volumes I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Dispersal and Grief

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be safer areas – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a photo: in the faraway, a factory was burning, thick smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to chase them.

During those days, emotions moved through the city like a front: swift terror, apprehension, righteous anger at the wrong, then apathy. Beyond the personal impact, the attack destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick look-ups and materials that translation demands.

Outside, blast waves blew windows from their sashes; at a family member's house, every sheet of glass was destroyed, the furniture lay damaged, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an easel, declining to let quiet and dust have the final say.

Converting Grief

A picture was shared on social media of a young artist who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an older woman running between alleys, shouting a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some repressed remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: transforming destruction into image, demise into lines, mourning into longing.

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst ruin, I found myself rendering a fable 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 lost his sight yet persisted creating until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all yearned for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than a skill: it was an act of resistance, of holding one's ground, of persisting.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that language study become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, goal, practice, anchor, and metaphor” all at once.

A Marked Legacy

And then came the image. I noticed it on a platform and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, damaged but intact, 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 unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but persisting.

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 was important”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else disappears. It is a subtle, stubborn rejection to disappear.