Among the Bombed-Out Remains of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Volume I Had Rendered

In the rubble of a destroyed apartment block, a particular vision lingered with me: a tome I had translated from the English language to Farsi, sitting partially covered in dirt and soot. Its jacket was ripped and dirtied, its pages bent and singed, but it was still legible. Still communicating.

A Metropolis Under Assault

Two days prior, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no sirens, just unexpected, forceful blasts. The internet was entirely disconnected. I was in my residence, translating a text about what it means to move words across cultures, and the morals and anxieties of inhabiting a different perspective. As buildings came down, I sat revising a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the persistence of meaning.

Everything ceased. A project my publisher had been about to send to press was stuck when the printer closed. Retailers shut 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 worrying about the bookshelves in my apartment, holding reference books, valuable books I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Distance and Grief

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous areas – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a picture: in the faraway, a industrial site was ablaze, black smoke coiling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like a front: sudden fear, apprehension, moral outrage at the wrong, then numbness. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and materials that translation demands.

Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every window was broken, the possessions lay broken, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an easel, choosing not to let silence and dust have the last word.

Translating Pain

A photograph was shared digitally of a young writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an aged woman dashing between alleys, calling a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some repressed recollection. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: transforming destruction into picture, demise into lines, mourning into search.

The Craft as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still amidst ruin, I found myself rendering 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 persisted working until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the impossible. 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 greater than literary craft: it was an act of defiance, of staying put, of enduring.

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

An Enduring Legacy

And then came the image. I spotted it on a platform and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, damaged but surviving, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, devoid of life among the debris and ruins. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but persisting.

I gazed upon 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 fire, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else falls away. It is a subtle, stubborn refusal to disappear.