Amid those Bombed-Out Remains of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Volume I Had Translated

Among the wreckage of a fallen apartment block, a solitary sight remained with me: a volume I had converted from the English language to Persian, lying partially covered in dirt and ash. Its cover was shredded and dirtied, its leaves curled and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still uttering words.

An Urban Center During Bombardment

Two days before, projectiles started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, powerful explosions. The internet was entirely severed. I was in my residence, translating a book about what it means to transport text across cultures, and the ethics and anxieties of taking on another’s perspective. As buildings fell, I sat revising a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the endurance of purpose.

Everything ceased. A manuscript my publisher had been about to send to press was halted when the printer shut down. Shops locked their doors one by one. One night, when the booms were too close, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, filled with dictionaries, valuable volumes I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Distance and Devastation

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 picture: in the background, a factory was ablaze, dark smoke coiling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions moved through the city like a storm: sudden terror, unease, righteous anger at the injustice, then apathy. Beyond the emotional toll, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick searches and sources that translation demands.

Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their casings; at a family member's house, every pane was destroyed, the belongings lay damaged, objects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an easel, declining to let silence and debris have the ultimate victory.

Translating Pain

A photograph was shared online of a young artist who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her poem went spread rapidly alongside her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an older 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 stirred some repressed recollection. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: transforming devastation into image, death into verse, grief into longing.

The Work as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of ruin, I found myself rendering a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet kept creating until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all yearned for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond a skill: it was an act of resistance, of staying put, of persisting.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his cell, asking for more books, insisting that linguistic work become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, hope, practice, anchor, and symbol” all at once.

A Scarred Work

And then came the picture. I spotted it on a platform and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, marked but whole, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, stripped of life among the debris and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but enduring.

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 full weight of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else falls away. It is a quiet, stubborn rejection to be silenced.