Within those Bombed-Out Debris of an Apartment Block, I Found a Book I Had Translated

Within the wreckage of a collapsed building, a particular sight lingered with me: a volume I had rendered from the English language to Farsi, sitting partially covered in dust and ash. Its jacket was shredded and smudged, its pages bent and scorched, but it was still readable. Still uttering words.

An Urban Center Amid Attack

Two days prior, rockets began striking the city. There were no warnings, just sudden, forceful detonations. The digital network was entirely cut off. I was in my flat, translating a book about what it means to move text across languages, and the ethics and anxieties of inhabiting another’s voice. As edifices fell, I sat polishing a text that contended, in its understated way, for the persistence of meaning.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publisher had been about to send to press was halted when the printing house ceased operations. Retailers closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, holding reference books, rare editions I had spent years collecting 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 survive the night.

Dispersal and Grief

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous locations – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a image: in the distance, a factory was on fire, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions moved through the city like a front: instant fear, anxiety, righteous anger at the injustice, then detachment. Beyond the personal impact, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick searches and materials that translation demands.

Outside, shockwaves ripped windows from their sashes; at a relative's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the possessions lay broken, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an easel, declining to let stillness and dirt have the final say.

Transforming Sorrow

A picture circulated digitally of a young poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral with her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an aged woman hurrying between alleyways, shouting a name. People said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some deep-seated recollection. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: changing ruin into image, demise into poetry, grief into longing.

The Craft as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself working on 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 experienced the loss of his sight yet kept working until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth striving for.

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

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his cell, asking for more books, insisting that linguistic work become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, hope, discipline, foundation, and analogy” all at once.

A Scarred Voice

And then came the photograph. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, scarred but intact, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been black and white, drained of life among the rubble and ruins. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but persisting.

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 fire, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else disappears. It is a persistent, unyielding refusal to be silenced.