Among the Bombed-Out Debris of an Apartment Block, I Found a Volume I’d Translated

Among the debris of a fallen apartment block, a particular sight stayed with me: a volume I had converted from English to Farsi, sitting partially covered in dust and ash. Its jacket was shredded and dirtied, its sheets bent and burned, but it was still readable. Still uttering words.

A City Under Attack

Two days before, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, powerful detonations. The web was totally disconnected. I was in my residence, rendering a text about what it means to carry words across cultures, and the principles and concerns of occupying a different perspective. As edifices fell, I sat revising a text that suggested, in its quiet way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything ceased. A project my publishing house had been about to send to press was stuck when the printing house shut down. Retailers locked their doors one by one. One night, when the explosions were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, filled with lexicons, hard-to-find books I had spent years accumulating 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 survive the night.

Separation and Loss

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous areas – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a picture: in the distance, a factory was on fire, black smoke curling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to chase them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like a front: sudden dread, unease, righteous anger at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the emotional toll, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and references that the work demands.

Outside, blast waves ripped windows from their casings; at a family member's house, every window was destroyed, the furniture lay broken, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, creating at an easel, refusing to let quiet and dirt have the last word.

Converting Pain

A picture was shared online of a young writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went spread rapidly alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an older woman running between passages, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried recollection. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: changing ruin into art, demise into lines, mourning into longing.

Translation as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of devastation, I found myself working on 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 lost his sight yet kept creating until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all yearned for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than literary craft: it was an act of defiance, of staying put, of persisting.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; 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 “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, goal, discipline, anchor, and symbol” all at once.

A Scarred Work

And then came the image. I noticed it on a website and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, scarred but surviving, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, drained of life among the debris and debris. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but enduring.

I stared at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a political act”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else falls away. It is a quiet, determined refusal to vanish.