Amid the Bombed-Out Remains of an Apartment Block, I Found a Volume I Had Translated

In the wreckage of a destroyed apartment block, a particular image stayed with me: a volume I had translated from the English language to Persian, sitting half-buried in dust and soot. Its jacket was torn and smudged, its sheets bent and burned, but it was still readable. Still uttering words.

A City During Attack

Two days before, rockets commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, powerful detonations. The internet was completely cut off. I was in my residence, rendering a text about what it means to move text across tongues, and the morals and anxieties of taking on someone else's perspective. As buildings fell, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its subtle way, for the endurance of purpose.

Everything ceased. A book my publisher had been about to send to press was halted when the printing house closed. Shops closed one by one. One night, when the explosions were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the bookshelves in my apartment, stocked with reference books, rare books I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Distance and Devastation

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be safer towns – 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 background, a factory was ablaze, thick smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to chase them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like a storm: swift terror, unease, moral outrage at the wrong, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick queries and references that translation demands.

Outside, blast waves tore windows from their casings; at a family member's house, every pane was destroyed, the belongings lay broken, objects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, working at an stand, refusing to let quiet and dust have the last word.

Transforming Sorrow

A photograph circulated on social media of a 23-year-old poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her poem went viral with her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an older woman running between alleyways, yelling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried memory. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: turning devastation into art, loss into lines, grief into longing.

The Craft as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by ruin, I found myself rendering a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet persisted creating until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all desired – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth striving for.

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

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

A Marked Work

And then came the image. I noticed it on a news site and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, scarred but whole, my name printed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, stripped of life among the concrete and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been invisible, 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 political act”, 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 erased. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else falls away. It is a quiet, unyielding declination to vanish.