Within those Bombed-Out Remains of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Book I Had Translated

Among the debris of a collapsed apartment block, a particular image stayed with me: a volume I had translated from the English language to Farsi, lying partly concealed in dust and ash. Its jacket was torn and dirtied, its leaves bent and singed, but it was still readable. Still speaking.

A Metropolis Under Assault

Two days prior, rockets commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, violent detonations. The internet was totally disconnected. I was in my apartment, translating a book about what it means to transport language across languages, and the principles and concerns of occupying someone else's perspective. As buildings fell, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything halted. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to publish was stranded when the facility shut down. Retailers locked their doors one by one. One night, when the explosions were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop worrying about the bookshelves in my apartment, holding lexicons, rare volumes I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Distance and Grief

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous locations – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the distance, a industrial site was on fire, dark smoke curling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and danger seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like weather: instant terror, anxiety, moral outrage at the injustice, then detachment. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and sources that translation demands.

Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every window was destroyed, the possessions lay ruined, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an stand, refusing to let quiet and dust have the final say.

Converting Sorrow

A picture circulated online of a 23-year-old writer who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her poem went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an elderly woman running between alleyways, shouting a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some buried remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

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

The Work as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by ruin, I found myself rendering a fable about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet continued creating until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all desired – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than a skill: it was an act of perseverance, of remaining, of enduring.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his confinement, asking for more resources, insisting that language study become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, goal, practice, foundation, and analogy” all at once.

A Scarred Voice

And then came the picture. I spotted it on a platform and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, marked but intact, my name printed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been black and white, drained of life among the debris and ruins. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but persisting.

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 attack, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be forgotten. 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.