Among the Bombed-Out Remains of an Apartment Block, I Found a Book I Had Translated

Among the debris of a fallen building, a single image stayed with me: a book I had rendered from the English language to Persian, sitting half-buried in dust and soot. Its front was torn and dirtied, its pages bent and singed, but it was still legible. Still speaking.

A Metropolis Amid Bombardment

Two days before, missiles started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, forceful blasts. The web was entirely severed. I was in my flat, working on a text about what it means to move language across tongues, and the morals and worries of occupying another’s voice. As edifices fell, I sat revising a text that argued, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of significance.

Everything ceased. A book my publisher had been about to send to press was halted when the printer closed. Retailers closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the shelves in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, hard-to-find volumes I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Separation and Loss

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be safer locations – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a photo: in the distance, a industrial site was ablaze, black smoke curling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like a front: sudden dread, anxiety, indignation at the unfairness, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and materials that the work demands.

Outside, blast waves ripped windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every window was shattered, the possessions lay damaged, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, painting at an easel, declining to let silence and dust have the ultimate victory.

Converting Pain

A photograph spread digitally of a young artist who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an older woman hurrying between alleys, calling a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried recollection. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: transforming destruction into picture, demise into verse, grief into longing.

The Craft 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 heal only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet kept working until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward.

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

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his prison cell, asking for more resources, insisting that translation become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, aspiration, discipline, foundation, and metaphor” all at once.

A Scarred Voice

And then came the photograph. I noticed it on a website and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, scarred but whole, 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 act with consequences”, but I had never felt the full weight of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else falls away. It is a quiet, stubborn declination to disappear.