Amid those Bombed-Out Remains of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Volume I’d Translated

Within the debris of a collapsed apartment block, a particular vision stayed with me: a tome I had rendered from English to Persian, resting partially covered in dust and soot. Its jacket was torn and stained, its leaves bent and scorched, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking.

An Urban Center Under Attack

Two days before, rockets started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, powerful blasts. The web was entirely severed. I was in my flat, translating a text about what it means to transport words across languages, and the morals and anxieties of inhabiting another’s voice. As buildings collapsed, I sat polishing a text that argued, in its quiet way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything ceased. A project my publisher had been about to publish was stranded when the printing house shut down. Bookstores locked their doors one by one. One night, when the booms were too imminent, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop thinking about the library in my apartment, holding reference books, hard-to-find editions I had spent years collecting 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 Devastation

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure towns – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a photo: in the background, a plant was ablaze, dark smoke spiraling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and danger seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods passed over the city like weather: instant dread, apprehension, righteous anger at the wrong, then detachment. Beyond the emotional toll, the shelling eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and references that the work demands.

Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the possessions lay broken, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, working at an easel, refusing to let silence and debris have the last word.

Converting Sorrow

A picture spread digitally of a 23-year-old writer who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an older woman dashing between alleyways, shouting a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some deep-seated remembrance. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: turning devastation into picture, death into poetry, sorrow into longing.

Translation as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst devastation, I found myself rendering a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet continued working until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all longed for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth pursuing.

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

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

An Enduring Work

And then came the image. I noticed it on a platform and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, scarred but intact, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, devoid of life among the concrete and ruins. 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 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 had significance”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a subtle, determined refusal to vanish.