Within those Bombed-Out Remains of an Apartment Block, I Found a Book I’d Translated

Within the wreckage of a destroyed building, a single sight remained with me: a book I had rendered from the English language to Farsi, resting partly concealed in dust and soot. Its cover was ripped and dirtied, its sheets curled and scorched, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating.

A City Amid Assault

Two days earlier, projectiles began striking the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, violent detonations. The web was totally severed. I was in my flat, rendering a work about what it means to transport words across cultures, and the morals and worries of inhabiting another’s narrative. As structures came down, I sat revising a text that argued, in its subtle way, for the persistence of purpose.

Everything ceased. A project my publishing house had been about to send to press was halted when the printing house ceased operations. Shops locked their doors one by one. One night, when the explosions were too close, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the bookshelves in my apartment, holding lexicons, hard-to-find books I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Dispersal and Grief

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be safer locations – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a factory was on fire, thick smoke spiraling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions moved through the city like a storm: swift fear, unease, indignation at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the emotional toll, the shelling eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick look-ups and materials that the work demands.

Outside, concussive forces ripped windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every window was shattered, the belongings lay broken, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, painting at an stand, choosing not to let silence and debris have the ultimate victory.

Translating Sorrow

A image was shared on social media of a 23-year-old writer who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her writing went was widely shared next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman running between alleys, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some deep-seated memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

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

The Work as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of destruction, I found myself translating a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted producing until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all longed for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth pursuing.

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

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his prison cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that linguistic work become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, goal, discipline, anchor, and analogy” all at once.

A Marked Voice

And then came the image. I spotted it on a platform and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, scarred but intact, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, stripped 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 apparent – scarred, but enduring.

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 was important”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, unyielding refusal to be silenced.