Among those Bombed-Out Remains of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Book I Had Translated

Within the wreckage of a fallen building, a particular vision lingered with me: a tome I had translated from the English language to Farsi, lying half-buried in dust and soot. Its cover was shredded and stained, its pages curled and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating.

A Metropolis Under Assault

Two days before, missiles began striking the city. There were no sirens, just abrupt, forceful blasts. The internet was entirely cut off. I was in my flat, rendering a book about what it means to move text across languages, and the principles and concerns of taking on someone else's narrative. As structures came down, I sat revising a text that argued, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything stopped. A book my publisher had been about to publish was halted when the facility shut down. Bookstores shut 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 thinking about the library in my apartment, filled with dictionaries, rare editions I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That library was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Separation and Loss

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous towns – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the background, a factory was burning, dark smoke coiling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to pursue them.

During those days, feelings swept through the city like a front: sudden terror, unease, righteous anger at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the attack eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick queries and references that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces ripped windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every pane was broken, the possessions lay broken, objects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, creating at an stand, refusing to let stillness and debris have the final say.

Transforming Grief

A image was shared online of a 23-year-old poet who was died when missiles struck a building. Her poem went was widely shared with her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an older woman dashing between passages, yelling a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: changing ruin into picture, death into lines, sorrow into quest.

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself translating a fable about a king whose daughter will recover 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 kept producing until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all longed for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward.

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

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; 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 “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, goal, discipline, support, and analogy” all at once.

An Enduring Voice

And then came the picture. I saw it on a platform and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, damaged but surviving, my name printed 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 anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but persisting.

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 full weight of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice mattered”. 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, unyielding declination to be silenced.