Within the Bombed-Out Debris of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Volume I’d Rendered

Within the debris of a fallen building, a particular vision lingered with me: a tome I had rendered from English to Farsi, resting partially covered in dirt and soot. Its cover was ripped and dirtied, its sheets bent and burned, but it was still legible. Still speaking.

A Metropolis During Bombardment

Two days prior, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, powerful blasts. The internet was entirely disconnected. I was in my residence, translating a book about what it means to carry words across tongues, and the morals and anxieties of inhabiting someone else's voice. As edifices collapsed, I sat revising a text that suggested, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything halted. A project my publishing house had been about to go to print was stuck when the printing house closed. Bookstores shut one by one. One night, when the explosions were too close, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the bookshelves in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, valuable editions I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Dispersal and Loss

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure towns – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a image: in the distance, a plant was ablaze, dark smoke spiraling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and danger seemed to follow them.

During those days, feelings moved through the city like weather: sudden dread, unease, righteous anger at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate searches and sources that the craft demands.

Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their casings; at a family member's house, every sheet of glass was destroyed, the belongings lay damaged, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an easel, refusing to let stillness and dust have the ultimate victory.

Translating Grief

A photograph spread digitally of a 23-year-old poet who was died when missiles struck a building. Her poem went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman dashing between alleys, shouting a name. People said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: transforming devastation into image, demise into poetry, sorrow into quest.

Translation as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of devastation, I found myself translating a story for young readers 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 lost his sight yet continued producing until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than literary craft: it was an act of perseverance, of holding one's ground, of holding on.

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 linguistic work become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, hope, rigor, foundation, and metaphor” all at once.

A Scarred Voice

And then came the photograph. I noticed it on a website and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, damaged but intact, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been black and white, devoid of life among the concrete and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been invisible, 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 act with consequences”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, determined rejection to be silenced.