Amid the Bombed-Out Debris of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Book I Had Translated

Within the debris of a destroyed apartment block, a particular sight remained with me: a volume I had converted from the English language to Farsi, lying partially covered in dust and soot. Its cover was torn and stained, its leaves bent and scorched, but it was still decipherable. Still uttering words.

An Urban Center Under Attack

Two days prior, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, violent detonations. The internet was entirely cut off. I was in my apartment, rendering a text about what it means to carry words across languages, and the principles and worries of occupying another’s perspective. As edifices came down, I sat polishing a text that contended, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publisher had been about to publish was stranded when the facility closed. Shops closed one by one. One night, when the explosions were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, holding reference books, hard-to-find books I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Separation and Devastation

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be safer locations – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a picture: in the faraway, a industrial site was on fire, thick smoke spiraling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, moods passed over the city like a front: instant dread, apprehension, moral outrage at the wrong, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate queries and references that translation demands.

Outside, blast waves tore windows from their frames; at a relative's house, every pane was shattered, the furniture lay damaged, personal effects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, creating at an stand, refusing to let quiet and dust have the ultimate victory.

Converting Pain

A photograph was shared digitally of a 23-year-old writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her poem went spread rapidly next to her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an older woman dashing between alleyways, yelling a name. People said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some repressed remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: changing destruction into picture, loss into verse, grief into search.

The Work as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by ruin, 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 continued creating until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all desired – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth striving for.

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

One day, in broad 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 translation become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, aspiration, discipline, anchor, and symbol” all at once.

A Scarred Work

And then came the image. I spotted it on a platform and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, marked but whole, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, drained of life among the concrete and ruins. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but surviving.

I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a political act”, 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 obliterated. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, stubborn refusal to disappear.