Among the Bombed-Out Remains of an Residential Building, I Saw a Volume I’d Translated

Within the rubble of a fallen apartment block, a solitary vision lingered with me: a tome I had rendered from English to Persian, sitting partly concealed in dust and ash. Its front was torn and stained, its leaves bent and singed, but it was still legible. Still speaking.

A City Amid Bombardment

Two days before, missiles commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, forceful detonations. The internet was totally severed. I was in my flat, rendering a text about what it means to move words across cultures, and the ethics and worries of taking on another’s narrative. As structures collapsed, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its subtle way, for the endurance of purpose.

Everything halted. A book my publishing house had been about to publish was stranded when the printing house ceased operations. Retailers locked their doors one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the bookshelves in my apartment, filled with dictionaries, rare volumes I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Separation and Devastation

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous locations – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a photo: in the distance, a industrial site was ablaze, black smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and danger seemed to chase them.

During those days, moods moved through the city like a storm: instant terror, apprehension, righteous anger at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and sources that the work demands.

Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every pane was broken, the belongings lay ruined, objects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, painting at an easel, refusing to let stillness and debris have the final say.

Converting Pain

A picture circulated on social media of a young writer who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an older woman running between alleys, shouting a name. People said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some deep-seated recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: changing destruction into picture, demise into poetry, sorrow into search.

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by ruin, I found myself translating a fable about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet kept creating until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all longed for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than literary craft: it was an act of resistance, of remaining, of holding on.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; 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 “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, hope, rigor, anchor, and analogy” all at once.

A Marked Work

And then came the image. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, scarred but whole, 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 surviving.

I stared at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, 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 obliterated. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else falls away. It is a persistent, stubborn declination to disappear.