Amid those Bombed-Out Debris of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Volume I’d Translated

Among the wreckage of a fallen structure, a solitary image stayed with me: a tome I had converted from English to Persian, resting partially covered in dirt and soot. Its jacket was ripped and smudged, its sheets bent and scorched, but it was still readable. Still speaking.

A Metropolis Under Assault

Two days earlier, missiles commenced attacking the city. There were no sirens, just abrupt, violent explosions. The digital network was completely disconnected. I was in my flat, rendering a work about what it means to move text across cultures, and the morals and anxieties of occupying a different voice. As buildings came down, I sat polishing a text that argued, in its quiet way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything halted. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to go to print was stranded when the printer ceased operations. Shops locked their doors one by one. One night, when the booms were too nearby, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the bookshelves in my apartment, filled with dictionaries, hard-to-find editions I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my lifework, 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 safer areas – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a image: in the background, a plant was burning, black smoke coiling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions passed over the city like a storm: swift dread, apprehension, righteous anger at the unfairness, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant look-ups and materials that the work demands.

Outside, concussive forces ripped windows from their sashes; at a cousin'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, creating at an stand, choosing not to let stillness and dirt have the final say.

Translating Sorrow

A image circulated online of a young poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an elderly woman hurrying between alleys, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some repressed remembrance. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: transforming ruin into picture, loss into lines, mourning into longing.

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of ruin, I found myself translating a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet kept producing until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all yearned for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than an art form: it was an act of resistance, of remaining, of holding on.

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

A Scarred Legacy

And then came the photograph. I saw it on a website and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, scarred but whole, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, drained of life among the debris and ruins. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but persisting.

I looked 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 bombardment, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else falls away. It is a persistent, stubborn rejection to disappear.