Within the Bombed-Out Remains of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Volume I Had Translated

In the rubble of a fallen structure, a particular sight lingered with me: a book I had converted from the English language to Farsi, sitting partially covered in dust and ash. Its cover was torn and dirtied, its sheets bent and burned, but it was still legible. Still speaking.

An Urban Center Under Bombardment

Two days earlier, missiles began striking the city. There were no sirens, just abrupt, violent blasts. The digital network was entirely severed. I was in my apartment, working on a text about what it means to carry words across tongues, and the ethics and anxieties of occupying someone else's perspective. As buildings fell, I sat revising a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of significance.

Everything ceased. A manuscript my publisher had been about to go to print was stuck when the printer ceased operations. Retailers shut one by one. One night, when the blasts were too nearby, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop thinking about the bookshelves in my apartment, stocked with reference books, hard-to-find volumes I had spent years gathering 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 make it through the night.

Separation and Loss

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure areas – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a photo: in the distance, a factory was burning, thick smoke spiraling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, emotions moved through the city like a front: swift fear, apprehension, righteous anger at the injustice, then apathy. Beyond the emotional toll, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and references that the craft demands.

Outside, blast waves tore windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was destroyed, the possessions lay damaged, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, creating at an easel, declining to let quiet and dirt have the ultimate victory.

Converting Sorrow

A image circulated digitally of a young artist who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her writing went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman hurrying between alleyways, yelling a name. People said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some deep-seated memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: transforming destruction into art, demise into poetry, mourning into search.

Translation as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of destruction, I found myself rendering 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 lost his sight yet persisted producing until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all desired – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond literary craft: it was an act of resistance, of remaining, of persisting.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his prison cell, asking for more resources, insisting that language study become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, aspiration, rigor, anchor, and analogy” all at once.

A Scarred Work

And then came the picture. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, marked but intact, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, drained of life among the rubble and debris. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but persisting.

I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, determined refusal to disappear.