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

Within the rubble of a collapsed apartment block, a solitary vision lingered with me: a book I had translated from the English language to Persian, lying partly concealed in dust and ash. Its jacket was ripped and stained, its sheets curled and scorched, but it was still decipherable. Still uttering words.

A Metropolis During Assault

Two days before, missiles started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, violent detonations. The internet was completely cut off. I was in my apartment, rendering a book about what it means to move language across tongues, and the ethics and worries of inhabiting someone else's perspective. As edifices came down, I sat editing a text that argued, in its quiet way, for the endurance of purpose.

Everything halted. A book my publishing house had been about to send to press was stuck when the facility ceased operations. Retailers shut one by one. One night, when the explosions were too nearby, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop worrying about the library in my apartment, holding dictionaries, hard-to-find volumes 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 survive the night.

Separation and Loss

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure locations – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a industrial site was burning, thick smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and threat seemed to chase them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like a storm: swift terror, apprehension, indignation at the wrong, then apathy. Beyond the personal impact, the attack destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every pane was destroyed, the belongings lay damaged, objects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, painting at an easel, refusing to let stillness and dirt have the ultimate victory.

Transforming Sorrow

A image was shared digitally of a young writer who was died when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral with her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman hurrying between alleyways, calling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some deep-seated recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: changing destruction into picture, demise into verse, sorrow into search.

Translation as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself rendering a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet persisted producing until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all yearned for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than an art form: it was an act of defiance, of remaining, of enduring.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his cell, asking for more books, insisting that translation become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, aspiration, practice, support, and metaphor” all at once.

A Scarred Legacy

And then came the image. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, damaged but intact, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, 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 apparent – scarred, but persisting.

I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a act with consequences”, 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 erased. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else crumbles. It is a subtle, determined rejection to vanish.