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

Within the debris of a destroyed apartment block, a single vision stayed with me: a book I had converted from English to Farsi, sitting partly concealed in dirt and ash. Its jacket was ripped and stained, its pages bent and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating.

An Urban Center During Assault

Two days earlier, rockets started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, forceful blasts. The internet was entirely cut off. I was in my residence, working on a work about what it means to transport text across languages, and the ethics and worries of taking on someone else's voice. As buildings fell, I sat editing a text that argued, in its understated way, for the persistence of meaning.

Everything halted. A manuscript my publisher had been about to go to print was stuck when the printer closed. Retailers locked their doors one by one. One night, when the explosions were too nearby, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the bookshelves in my apartment, filled with reference books, rare volumes I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Dispersal and Loss

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be safer areas – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a photo: in the faraway, a industrial site was burning, thick smoke spiraling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, feelings swept through the city like weather: instant fear, anxiety, righteous anger at the wrong, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and materials that the work demands.

Outside, blast waves ripped windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every pane was shattered, the belongings lay ruined, personal effects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an stand, refusing to let stillness and dust have the ultimate victory.

Converting Pain

A photograph circulated digitally of a 23-year-old poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her poem went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an elderly woman running between alleyways, yelling a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some repressed remembrance. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: turning devastation into picture, loss into verse, grief into quest.

The Work as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself rendering a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet kept creating until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all yearned for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth reaching toward.

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

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his confinement, asking for more books, insisting that linguistic work become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, aspiration, rigor, support, and metaphor” 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, marked but whole, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, stripped of life among the rubble and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but enduring.

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 true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be obliterated. 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 disappear.