Among the Bombed-Out Remains of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Book I Had Translated

Among the debris of a fallen apartment block, a particular vision lingered with me: a volume I had translated from the English language to Farsi, sitting half-buried in dust and soot. Its front was torn and smudged, its sheets curled and singed, but it was still readable. Still communicating.

A City During Bombardment

Two days before, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, forceful detonations. The internet was totally disconnected. I was in my flat, translating a text about what it means to move language across tongues, and the principles and anxieties of occupying a different narrative. As edifices fell, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything stopped. A project my publisher had been about to go to print was halted when the printer closed. Bookstores shut one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the bookshelves in my apartment, stocked with reference books, hard-to-find books I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Dispersal and Grief

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be safer 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 faraway, a factory was on fire, black smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly far away, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like a front: instant fear, anxiety, righteous anger at the unfairness, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and materials that the work demands.

Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was destroyed, the possessions lay ruined, objects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, creating at an easel, choosing not to let stillness and dust have the ultimate victory.

Translating Pain

A picture spread on social media of a 23-year-old writer who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her poem went spread rapidly alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an older woman hurrying between alleys, calling a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some buried memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: changing destruction into image, death into poetry, grief into search.

Translation as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of destruction, I found myself working on a children’s tale 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 persisted creating 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 striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than literary craft: it was an act of perseverance, 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 philosopher in his prison cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that translation become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, hope, discipline, support, and analogy” all at once.

A Marked Legacy

And then came the image. I noticed it on a platform and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, scarred but surviving, my name printed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, drained of life among the concrete and debris. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but enduring.

I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a act with consequences”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, stubborn refusal to disappear.