Among those Bombed-Out Debris of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Volume I Had Translated

Among the rubble of a collapsed building, a particular sight lingered with me: a book I had rendered from the English language to Farsi, resting partially covered in dust and ash. Its cover was ripped and dirtied, its leaves curled and burned, but it was still readable. Still uttering words.

An Urban Center Under Bombardment

Two days earlier, missiles started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, forceful explosions. The digital network was totally severed. I was in my flat, working on a text about what it means to transport words across languages, and the principles and worries of inhabiting someone else's perspective. As edifices collapsed, I sat revising a text that argued, in its understated way, for the persistence of significance.

Everything stopped. A project my publisher had been about to send to press was stuck when the printer closed. Shops shut one by one. One night, when the booms were too close, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, stocked with reference books, valuable books I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Distance and Devastation

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure areas – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a plant was on fire, thick smoke spiraling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to follow them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like a storm: instant terror, anxiety, righteous anger at the injustice, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the bombardment eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant look-ups and sources that the work demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their frames; at a relative's house, every pane was destroyed, the furniture lay broken, objects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, painting at an stand, declining to let stillness and debris have the last word.

Converting Grief

A image spread online of a 23-year-old writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went spread rapidly alongside her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an elderly woman dashing between alleys, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some repressed recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: changing ruin into art, demise into lines, mourning into search.

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, 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 significant meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet kept producing until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all yearned for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth striving for.

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

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his cell, asking for more resources, insisting that language study become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, aspiration, practice, support, and metaphor” all at once.

An Enduring Work

And then came the picture. I saw it on a website and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, damaged but whole, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, stripped of life among the debris and debris. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – 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 true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else falls away. It is a persistent, stubborn declination to be silenced.