Amid those Bombed-Out Remains of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Book I’d Rendered

In the wreckage of a fallen structure, a solitary vision remained with me: a tome I had translated from English to Farsi, sitting half-buried in dust and soot. Its front was torn and dirtied, its pages bent and scorched, but it was still decipherable. Still uttering words.

A City During Assault

Two days earlier, projectiles started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, powerful blasts. The web was completely severed. I was in my apartment, working on a work about what it means to carry text across tongues, and the principles and worries of taking on another’s perspective. As buildings fell, I sat revising a text that argued, in its subtle way, for the persistence of purpose.

Everything ceased. A project my publisher had been about to go to print was halted when the printer ceased operations. Shops closed one by one. One night, when the explosions were too close, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop thinking about the shelves in my apartment, stocked with reference books, rare books I had spent years gathering 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 safer locations – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a photo: in the background, a factory was on fire, dark smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to pursue them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like a storm: sudden terror, apprehension, indignation at the wrong, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the bombardment destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate queries and sources that the work demands.

Outside, concussive forces blew windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every pane was shattered, the furniture lay ruined, personal effects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, painting at an easel, declining to let silence and debris have the final say.

Converting Grief

A image circulated on social media of a 23-year-old poet who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared next to her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an aged woman hurrying between alleys, shouting a name. People said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some buried recollection. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: transforming devastation into image, demise into verse, sorrow into search.

The Craft as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst destruction, I found myself translating a fable about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet persisted producing until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all desired – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth pursuing.

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

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 resources, insisting that language study become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, aspiration, rigor, foundation, and metaphor” all at once.

A Marked Voice

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 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, stripped of life among the debris and debris. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but enduring.

I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a political act”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, stubborn declination to disappear.