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

In the wreckage of a collapsed building, a solitary sight stayed with me: a book I had converted from English to Farsi, resting half-buried in dust and ash. Its front was torn and stained, its leaves bent and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking.

An Urban Center During Bombardment

Two days before, projectiles began striking the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, powerful detonations. The internet was totally cut off. I was in my apartment, rendering a book about what it means to transport language across cultures, and the morals and anxieties of occupying someone else's perspective. As edifices came down, I sat revising a text that contended, in its quiet way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything ceased. A book my publisher had been about to publish was halted when the printing house ceased operations. Retailers closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the bookshelves in my apartment, holding dictionaries, rare books I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That library was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Distance and Loss

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure locations – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a photo: in the distance, a plant was burning, dark smoke spiraling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like a front: instant fear, anxiety, righteous anger at the injustice, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the bombardment eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick look-ups and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, shockwaves ripped windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the furniture lay broken, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, creating at an easel, refusing to let quiet and dirt have the last word.

Converting Sorrow

A picture spread digitally of a young poet who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared next to her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an aged woman dashing between alleyways, calling a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some deep-seated recollection. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: turning devastation into art, death into poetry, sorrow into search.

The Craft as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of destruction, I found myself rendering a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet kept working until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unreachable. 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 greater than literary craft: it was an act of resistance, 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 philosopher in his prison cell, asking for more resources, insisting that translation become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, hope, discipline, support, and analogy” all at once.

A Scarred Voice

And then came the image. I saw it on a website and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, scarred but intact, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, devoid of life among the debris and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been unseen, 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 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 subtle, determined rejection to be silenced.