Amid those Bombed-Out Remains of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Book I Had Translated

Within the rubble of a collapsed structure, a particular image lingered with me: a tome I had converted from English to Farsi, sitting partly concealed in dust and soot. Its cover was shredded and smudged, its sheets curled and singed, but it was still legible. Still communicating.

A City During Assault

Two days earlier, projectiles started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, forceful explosions. The internet was totally severed. I was in my residence, rendering a text about what it means to move words across tongues, and the ethics and anxieties of occupying another’s perspective. As buildings fell, I sat polishing a text that argued, in its subtle way, for the endurance of purpose.

Everything ceased. A book my publisher had been about to go to print was stranded when the printing house ceased operations. Bookstores locked their doors one by one. One night, when the booms were too nearby, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop thinking about the library in my apartment, filled with reference books, valuable volumes I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Separation and Loss

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous areas – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a picture: in the background, a factory was burning, dark smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions passed over the city like weather: swift dread, anxiety, indignation at the unfairness, then numbness. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and sources that the craft demands.

Outside, blast waves tore windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every pane was broken, the furniture lay ruined, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, painting at an easel, refusing to let silence and dust have the final say.

Translating Sorrow

A photograph was shared digitally of a young artist who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an older woman running between alleys, yelling a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some repressed memory. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: changing devastation into image, demise into verse, mourning into search.

The Craft as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still amidst destruction, I found myself working on a fable about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted creating until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all yearned for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond a skill: it was an act of perseverance, of staying put, of persisting.

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

A Scarred Work

And then came the photograph. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, damaged but whole, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, 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 persisting.

I looked 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 attack, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, stubborn refusal to disappear.