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

Within the debris of a fallen structure, a single vision stayed with me: a volume I had rendered from the English language to Persian, sitting partially covered in dust and ash. Its front was torn and stained, its sheets curled and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking.

A City During Attack

Two days prior, missiles began striking the city. There were no sirens, just sudden, powerful explosions. The web was entirely disconnected. I was in my apartment, rendering a work about what it means to carry language across languages, and the principles and concerns of inhabiting someone else's narrative. As edifices fell, I sat editing a text that contended, in its understated way, for the persistence of meaning.

Everything halted. A book my publishing house had been about to send to press was halted when the printer shut down. Shops shut one by one. One night, when the booms were too close, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, holding reference books, valuable books I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That library was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Distance and Grief

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure locations – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a plant was burning, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, emotions passed over the city like a front: instant dread, unease, indignation at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and sources that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces ripped windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every window was broken, the furniture lay broken, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an stand, choosing not to let stillness and dirt have the final say.

Transforming Pain

A photograph was shared on social media of a 23-year-old poet who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral alongside her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an elderly woman dashing between passages, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some repressed memory. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: turning devastation into art, loss into lines, sorrow into search.

Translation as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by ruin, I found myself working on a fable about a king whose daughter will get better 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 desired – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than an art form: it was an act of defiance, of holding one's ground, of holding on.

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

A Scarred Legacy

And then came the picture. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, 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 debris and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but persisting.

I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a act with consequences”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else falls away. It is a quiet, unyielding rejection to be silenced.