Amid the Bombed-Out Remains of an Residential Building, I Found a Volume I Had Translated

In the rubble of a collapsed apartment block, a solitary vision stayed with me: a tome I had rendered from the English language to Farsi, lying partially covered in dust and ash. Its front was ripped and dirtied, its leaves bent and scorched, but it was still decipherable. Still uttering words.

An Urban Center Under Attack

Two days before, missiles started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, forceful detonations. The internet was completely severed. I was in my flat, rendering a book about what it means to transport language across tongues, and the principles and worries of taking on another’s voice. As edifices collapsed, I sat editing a text that argued, in its quiet way, for the endurance of meaning.

Everything stopped. A book my publishing house had been about to publish was stranded when the printer ceased operations. Bookstores locked their doors one by one. One night, when the booms were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop thinking about the shelves in my apartment, stocked with lexicons, hard-to-find books I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That library was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Separation and Grief

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous towns – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a image: in the background, a factory was burning, black smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly elsewhere, and danger seemed to pursue them.

During those days, emotions passed over the city like a storm: sudden dread, apprehension, moral outrage at the injustice, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, blast waves blew windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the furniture lay ruined, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, creating at an stand, declining to let silence and dust have the last word.

Translating Sorrow

A photograph was shared on social media of a young writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman hurrying 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 buried memory. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: turning ruin into picture, demise into verse, mourning into quest.

The Work as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself working on a story for young readers 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 persisted working until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all longed for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than an art form: it was an act of defiance, of remaining, of enduring.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that language study become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, hope, discipline, anchor, and symbol” all at once.

An Enduring Legacy

And then came the image. I saw it on a platform and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, scarred but surviving, my name printed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, stripped of life among the debris and ruins. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but surviving.

I looked 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 bombardment, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be forgotten. 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 disappear.