Within those Bombed-Out Remains of an Residential Building, I Saw a Book I’d Translated

Among the debris of a destroyed structure, a single vision lingered with me: a tome I had rendered from English to Farsi, resting partially covered in dust and soot. Its front was ripped and stained, its leaves curled and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating.

An Urban Center Under Bombardment

Two days prior, rockets commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, forceful detonations. The web was entirely disconnected. I was in my residence, rendering a book about what it means to move language across languages, and the principles and concerns of taking on another’s narrative. As buildings collapsed, I sat editing a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the persistence of significance.

Everything stopped. A book my publishing house had been about to go to print was stranded when the facility shut down. Bookstores locked their doors one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, stocked with lexicons, rare volumes I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Dispersal and Grief

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be safer areas – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a image: in the distance, a industrial site was on fire, dark smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to pursue them.

During those days, moods passed over the city like weather: swift dread, anxiety, moral outrage at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick queries and materials that translation demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every pane was shattered, the possessions lay ruined, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, painting at an easel, declining to let stillness and debris have the final say.

Converting Sorrow

A photograph circulated digitally of a 23-year-old writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went viral alongside her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an older woman dashing between alleys, shouting a name. People said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some repressed memory. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

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

The Work as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself translating a story for young readers 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 working until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than literary craft: it was an act of perseverance, of staying put, of persisting.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a facility; 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 “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, goal, practice, foundation, and metaphor” all at once.

A Scarred Voice

And then came the image. I noticed it on a platform and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, marked but whole, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been black and white, devoid of life among the rubble and ruins. 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 act with consequences”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, determined declination to be silenced.