Amid those Bombed-Out Debris of an Apartment Block, I Found a Book I’d Translated

Within the rubble of a destroyed building, a solitary sight remained with me: a volume I had converted from the English language to Persian, resting partially covered in dirt and ash. Its front was ripped and dirtied, its leaves bent and burned, but it was still readable. Still uttering words.

An Urban Center During Attack

Two days before, missiles started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, forceful detonations. The internet was completely cut off. I was in my apartment, rendering a work about what it means to carry language across languages, and the ethics and anxieties of occupying a different voice. As edifices collapsed, I sat editing a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything halted. A project my publishing house had been about to send to press was stranded when the printer ceased operations. Retailers locked their doors one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the bookshelves in my apartment, filled with lexicons, hard-to-find books I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That library was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Dispersal and Grief

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be safer towns – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a plant was burning, thick smoke spiraling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and threat seemed to pursue them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like a storm: swift terror, apprehension, indignation at the injustice, then detachment. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate queries and references that the craft demands.

Outside, blast waves blew windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every pane was destroyed, the furniture lay broken, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, painting at an easel, choosing not to let silence and dirt have the ultimate victory.

Translating Grief

A photograph was shared on social media of a young artist who was died when missiles struck a building. Her poem went viral with her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an older woman dashing between passages, yelling a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some deep-seated memory. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: turning ruin into picture, death into verse, sorrow into search.

The Craft as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of ruin, I found myself working on a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet continued producing until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all longed for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than a skill: it was an act of resistance, 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 political thinker in his confinement, asking for more resources, insisting that linguistic work become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, hope, rigor, foundation, and metaphor” all at once.

An Enduring Work

And then came the picture. I noticed it on a news site and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, marked but intact, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, devoid of life among the rubble 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 looked 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 attack, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, determined declination to disappear.