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

In the rubble of a fallen structure, a solitary vision stayed with me: a book I had translated from English to Farsi, lying partially covered in dirt and ash. Its front was ripped and dirtied, its leaves bent and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking.

A City During Assault

Two days before, rockets started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, violent detonations. The web was totally cut off. I was in my residence, rendering a text about what it means to carry text across cultures, and the ethics and anxieties of inhabiting another’s narrative. As buildings fell, I sat revising a text that argued, in its understated way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything halted. A book my publishing house had been about to send to press was stuck when the facility closed. Shops locked their doors one by one. One night, when the explosions were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop thinking about the library in my apartment, filled with dictionaries, valuable books I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That library was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Separation and Loss

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous towns – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a image: in the background, a plant was ablaze, dark smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to pursue them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like a front: instant terror, apprehension, righteous anger at the wrong, then apathy. Beyond the personal impact, the attack eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick searches and sources that translation demands.

Outside, shockwaves ripped windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every window was destroyed, the furniture lay ruined, objects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an easel, refusing to let stillness and dust have the final say.

Transforming Sorrow

A image spread digitally of a 23-year-old artist who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an elderly woman running between alleyways, calling a name. People said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some repressed memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: turning ruin into art, demise into poetry, grief into quest.

Translation as Defiance

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 recover only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet persisted producing until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all yearned for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth striving for.

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

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his cell, asking for more books, insisting that translation become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, goal, practice, support, and symbol” all at once.

A Scarred Voice

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

I looked 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 was important”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else crumbles. It is a subtle, determined rejection to disappear.