Amid the Bombed-Out Debris of an Residential Building, I Found a Volume I Had Translated

Among the rubble of a collapsed apartment block, a single image lingered with me: a tome I had rendered from the English language to Persian, lying half-buried in dirt and soot. Its front was shredded and stained, its pages curled and scorched, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking.

A City Amid Bombardment

Two days before, missiles began striking the city. There were no alarms, just sudden, powerful blasts. The internet was completely severed. I was in my residence, rendering a book about what it means to transport language across cultures, and the morals and worries of inhabiting someone else's voice. As buildings fell, I sat polishing a text that argued, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything stopped. A book my publishing house had been about to go to print was stranded when the facility ceased operations. Bookstores closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the bookshelves in my apartment, holding dictionaries, valuable volumes I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Dispersal and Devastation

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous areas – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a image: in the distance, a plant was burning, dark smoke spiraling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly somewhere else, and danger seemed to pursue them.

During those days, moods moved through the city like a storm: swift dread, apprehension, indignation at the injustice, then apathy. Beyond the personal impact, the attack destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and materials that translation demands.

Outside, concussive forces blew windows from their casings; at a family member's house, every window was shattered, the furniture lay damaged, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, creating at an easel, declining to let quiet and dirt have the last word.

Transforming Pain

A picture spread on social media of a 23-year-old writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her poem went was widely shared with her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an older woman hurrying between alleyways, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some deep-seated recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: changing ruin into image, demise into lines, grief into longing.

The Craft as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst devastation, I found myself rendering a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted creating 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 impossible, yet still worth striving for.

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

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that language study become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, aspiration, discipline, foundation, and symbol” all at once.

An Enduring Work

And then came the photograph. I noticed it on a news site and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, marked but intact, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, drained of life among the debris 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 looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the full weight 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 haul stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else falls away. It is a subtle, determined refusal to be silenced.