Amid the Bombed-Out Remains of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Book I Had Rendered

In the debris of a collapsed apartment block, a solitary image stayed with me: a tome I had translated from English to Farsi, sitting partially covered in dust and soot. Its cover was shredded and smudged, its pages curled and scorched, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating.

An Urban Center Under Bombardment

Two days prior, missiles began striking the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, powerful detonations. The internet was totally disconnected. I was in my apartment, working on a work about what it means to move language across cultures, and the morals and concerns of occupying another’s voice. As buildings collapsed, I sat editing a text that argued, in its understated way, for the persistence of meaning.

Everything halted. A project my publishing house had been about to send to press was stuck when the facility closed. Bookstores shut one by one. One night, when the booms were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the bookshelves in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, hard-to-find books I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That library was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Dispersal and Loss

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure towns – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a picture: in the distance, a plant was burning, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and peril seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions passed over the city like weather: swift dread, apprehension, moral outrage at the injustice, then detachment. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick look-ups and sources that the craft demands.

Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every pane was broken, the possessions lay damaged, household items scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, painting at an easel, declining to let quiet and debris have the ultimate victory.

Translating Sorrow

A image circulated on social media of a 23-year-old poet who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared next to her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman hurrying between alleyways, yelling a name. People said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some deep-seated memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: changing devastation into art, demise into poetry, mourning into longing.

Translation as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by ruin, I found myself rendering a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet continued working until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all desired – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth striving for.

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

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his cell, asking for more books, insisting that translation become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, hope, practice, foundation, and metaphor” all at once.

A Scarred Legacy

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 whole, my name printed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been black and white, stripped of life among the debris and debris. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but surviving.

I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a political act”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice had significance”. 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 subtle, unyielding declination to vanish.