Among the Bombed-Out Remains of an Residential Building, I Found a Book I’d Translated

Within the debris of a fallen apartment block, a single sight stayed with me: a book I had translated from the English language to Farsi, lying partially covered in dust and soot. Its cover was shredded and stained, its sheets curled and singed, but it was still readable. Still communicating.

A Metropolis Under Bombardment

Two days before, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, forceful explosions. The digital network was completely disconnected. I was in my flat, rendering a book about what it means to carry language across tongues, and the principles and anxieties of occupying another’s voice. As buildings collapsed, I sat editing a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the persistence of meaning.

Everything stopped. A project my publisher had been about to publish was halted when the printing house closed. Retailers locked their doors one by one. One night, when the booms were too close, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop thinking about the bookshelves in my apartment, filled with reference books, rare volumes I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Dispersal and Devastation

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure locations – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a picture: in the faraway, a industrial site was ablaze, 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 a front: sudden fear, unease, moral outrage at the wrong, then numbness. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick queries and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, shockwaves ripped windows from their sashes; at a family member's house, every pane was destroyed, the possessions lay ruined, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, painting at an stand, refusing to let silence and dirt have the ultimate victory.

Transforming Sorrow

A photograph spread digitally of a young writer who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her poem went was widely shared next to her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman running between alleys, yelling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some buried remembrance. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: transforming devastation into image, demise into poetry, sorrow into quest.

The Work as Persistence

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

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

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his prison cell, asking for more books, insisting that translation become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, hope, practice, foundation, and symbol” all at once.

A Marked Work

And then came the image. I spotted it on a website and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, damaged but surviving, 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 concrete and debris. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – 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 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 crumbles. It is a persistent, determined refusal to vanish.