Within those Bombed-Out Remains of an Apartment Block, I Found a Volume I Had Translated

In the rubble of a destroyed building, a single image stayed with me: a book I had rendered from English to Farsi, lying partly concealed in dirt and ash. Its jacket was shredded and smudged, its leaves curled and burned, but it was still legible. Still uttering words.

A City Amid Bombardment

Two days prior, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no sirens, just unexpected, powerful detonations. The web was totally severed. I was in my residence, rendering a text about what it means to transport text across languages, and the ethics and concerns of taking on another’s narrative. As edifices collapsed, I sat revising a text that argued, in its subtle way, for the endurance of purpose.

Everything ceased. A book my publishing house had been about to go to print was halted when the printing house shut down. Shops shut one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the library in my apartment, holding lexicons, valuable editions I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That library was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Dispersal and Grief

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure towns – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a picture: in the background, a factory was ablaze, thick smoke coiling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to chase them.

During those days, feelings swept through the city like a storm: swift dread, unease, righteous anger at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick searches and materials that the work demands.

Outside, blast waves ripped windows from their sashes; at a relative's house, every window was broken, the belongings lay broken, objects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an stand, declining to let silence and debris have the last word.

Translating Grief

A image circulated digitally of a young poet who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly alongside her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman dashing between passages, yelling a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some repressed memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: transforming devastation into art, loss into poetry, sorrow into longing.

The Craft as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst ruin, I found myself rendering a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet continued working until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all longed for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward.

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

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his confinement, asking for more books, insisting that translation become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, goal, rigor, anchor, and analogy” all at once.

A Scarred Voice

And then came the photograph. I saw it on a news site and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, damaged but intact, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, drained of life among the concrete and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but persisting.

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 true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else disappears. It is a persistent, unyielding declination to be silenced.