Within the Bombed-Out Remains of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Volume I’d Translated

In the debris of a collapsed apartment block, a particular sight stayed with me: a tome I had translated from the English language to Persian, lying half-buried in dust and ash. Its jacket was torn and stained, its sheets bent and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating.

A City Amid Bombardment

Two days before, projectiles began striking the city. There were no sirens, just unexpected, violent explosions. The internet was completely severed. I was in my apartment, translating a work about what it means to carry words across languages, and the morals and anxieties of taking on a different voice. As structures came down, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything halted. A project my publishing house had been about to publish was stranded when the printing house ceased operations. Retailers closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop thinking about the library in my apartment, filled with dictionaries, hard-to-find editions I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Separation and Devastation

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure towns – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a picture: in the faraway, a industrial site was on fire, dark smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to follow them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like weather: sudden dread, anxiety, moral outrage at the unfairness, then detachment. Beyond the emotional toll, 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, blast waves ripped windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every window was broken, the furniture lay broken, objects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, painting at an stand, declining to let quiet and debris have the last word.

Converting Sorrow

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

We were all converting, in our own way: turning destruction into image, loss into lines, grief into search.

Translation as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself translating a fable about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet kept producing until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all desired – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than literary craft: it was an act of defiance, of staying put, of enduring.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his prison cell, asking for more books, insisting that language study become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, aspiration, practice, anchor, and analogy” all at once.

A Scarred Legacy

And then came the photograph. I spotted it on a platform and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, marked but surviving, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, devoid of life among the concrete and debris. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but surviving.

I stared 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 obliterated. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else disappears. It is a persistent, unyielding refusal to be silenced.