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

In the rubble of a collapsed building, a solitary sight lingered with me: a tome I had translated from English to Persian, sitting partially covered in dust and ash. Its jacket was shredded and stained, its pages curled and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking.

A City Under Bombardment

Two days before, projectiles started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, forceful detonations. The digital network was totally disconnected. I was in my residence, working on a book about what it means to move text across tongues, and the ethics and anxieties of inhabiting someone else's perspective. As structures fell, I sat revising a text that argued, in its understated way, for the persistence of purpose.

Everything stopped. A project my publishing house had been about to go to print was halted when the printer closed. Bookstores closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, stocked with reference books, hard-to-find editions I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That library was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Separation and Loss

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure locations – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a photo: in the background, a plant was burning, thick smoke spiraling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly somewhere else, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods swept through the city like a front: instant fear, apprehension, moral outrage at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate searches and sources that translation demands.

Outside, blast waves tore windows from their sashes; at a family member's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the belongings lay ruined, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an stand, choosing not to let stillness and dirt have the final say.

Translating Pain

A image spread online of a 23-year-old artist who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her poem went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an older woman running between passages, shouting a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some repressed memory. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: transforming destruction into image, death into lines, sorrow into longing.

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by 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 experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted working until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all longed for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than a skill: it was an act of defiance, of holding one's ground, of persisting.

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

An Enduring Work

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

I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, determined refusal to disappear.