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

Among the wreckage of a collapsed building, a solitary vision remained with me: a tome I had translated from English to Persian, sitting partly concealed in dust and ash. Its jacket was ripped and smudged, its pages bent and scorched, but it was still legible. Still communicating.

A Metropolis During Bombardment

Two days before, projectiles began striking the city. There were no sirens, just unexpected, violent detonations. The web was completely disconnected. I was in my apartment, rendering a text about what it means to carry language across cultures, and the ethics and anxieties of taking on another’s perspective. As structures came down, I sat revising a text that contended, in its understated way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything stopped. A project my publisher had been about to send to press was stuck when the facility shut down. Bookstores shut one by one. One night, when the explosions were too imminent, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, stocked with reference books, valuable volumes I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That library was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Dispersal and Loss

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

During those days, moods swept through the city like weather: instant dread, unease, moral outrage at the unfairness, then numbness. Beyond the psychological cost, the bombardment destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and materials that translation demands.

Outside, blast waves ripped windows from their sashes; at a family member's house, every pane was shattered, the furniture lay ruined, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, creating at an easel, declining to let silence and debris have the last word.

Translating Pain

A picture was shared digitally of a young writer who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her writing went was widely shared next to her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an elderly woman running between alleyways, calling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some deep-seated recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: changing ruin into art, death into verse, mourning into longing.

The Work as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself working on a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet kept working until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all yearned for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth striving for.

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

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

An Enduring Voice

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 renditions, marked but surviving, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, devoid of life among the rubble and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but enduring.

I stared at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a political act”, but I had never felt the full weight of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else disappears. It is a persistent, determined refusal to disappear.