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

In the rubble of a destroyed structure, a single vision lingered with me: a book I had converted from the English language to Farsi, resting partly concealed in dust and soot. Its cover was shredded and smudged, its pages curled and burned, but it was still readable. Still speaking.

An Urban Center Under Assault

Two days before, rockets commenced attacking the city. There were no sirens, just unexpected, violent blasts. The internet was entirely severed. I was in my flat, working on a book about what it means to move language across tongues, and the morals and concerns of taking on someone else's narrative. As edifices fell, I sat polishing a text that contended, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of significance.

Everything stopped. A book my publishing house had been about to go to print was stranded when the facility closed. Retailers shut one by one. One night, when the explosions were too close, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the library in my apartment, filled with reference books, hard-to-find editions I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Distance and Loss

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous areas – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a picture: in the background, a plant was ablaze, thick smoke spiraling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, feelings swept through the city like a storm: instant dread, apprehension, indignation at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick queries and materials that translation demands.

Outside, concussive forces blew windows from their sashes; at a family member's house, every window was broken, the belongings lay broken, objects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, painting at an stand, choosing not to let stillness and debris have the last word.

Translating Grief

A picture circulated digitally of a young writer who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her poem went spread rapidly alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman running between alleyways, yelling a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some deep-seated remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: turning ruin into image, demise into poetry, grief into search.

The Craft as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst destruction, I found myself working on a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet continued creating until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all yearned for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth reaching toward.

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

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his confinement, asking for more books, insisting that language study become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, goal, rigor, foundation, and metaphor” all at once.

A Scarred Voice

And then came the picture. I saw it on a website and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, marked but surviving, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been black and white, devoid of life among the debris and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but persisting.

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 full weight of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, unyielding declination to be silenced.