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

Within the wreckage of a collapsed structure, a single image lingered with me: a book I had translated from English to Farsi, sitting partially covered in dust and soot. Its cover was torn and smudged, its sheets bent and scorched, but it was still readable. Still uttering words.

An Urban Center Under Bombardment

Two days earlier, missiles began striking the city. There were no sirens, just sudden, violent explosions. The internet was completely disconnected. I was in my apartment, rendering a book about what it means to transport words across tongues, and the morals and anxieties of occupying another’s narrative. As edifices collapsed, I sat editing a text that contended, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of significance.

Everything ceased. A project my publishing house had been about to go to print was stuck when the printer ceased operations. Retailers locked their doors one by one. One night, when the blasts were too nearby, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the library in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, hard-to-find volumes I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Distance and Devastation

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be safer locations – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a industrial site was burning, thick smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and danger seemed to pursue them.

During those days, moods passed over the city like a storm: sudden terror, unease, moral outrage at the unfairness, then detachment. Beyond the emotional toll, the shelling eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and sources that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces ripped windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the furniture lay broken, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, creating at an easel, refusing to let stillness and dust have the last word.

Transforming Sorrow

A image circulated on social media of a young poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her poem went spread rapidly alongside her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an older woman running between alleyways, calling a name. People said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some deep-seated remembrance. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: transforming ruin into art, demise into poetry, mourning into quest.

Translation as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst devastation, I found myself rendering a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will get better 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 persisted creating until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than literary craft: it was an act of defiance, of staying put, of enduring.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his confinement, asking for more resources, insisting that translation become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, hope, rigor, support, and metaphor” all at once.

A Scarred Legacy

And then came the picture. I saw it on a platform and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, damaged but whole, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, drained of life among the debris and ruins. 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 fire, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else disappears. It is a persistent, unyielding declination to be silenced.