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

Within the rubble of a destroyed building, a solitary vision lingered with me: a volume I had translated from the English language to Farsi, resting partially covered in dirt and soot. Its front was shredded and smudged, its pages bent and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating.

A City During Attack

Two days earlier, missiles commenced attacking the city. There were no sirens, just sudden, forceful explosions. The digital network was completely severed. I was in my residence, rendering a book about what it means to carry text across languages, and the morals and anxieties of inhabiting someone else's narrative. As buildings collapsed, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its quiet way, for the persistence of meaning.

Everything stopped. A project my publishing house had been about to publish was stuck when the printing house closed. Bookstores locked their doors one by one. One night, when the explosions were too close, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, holding reference books, rare books I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Dispersal and Loss

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous locations – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a picture: in the distance, a industrial site was ablaze, dark smoke coiling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to chase them.

During those days, emotions passed over the city like a storm: swift dread, apprehension, indignation at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the personal impact, the bombardment destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant look-ups and references that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces ripped windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every sheet of glass was destroyed, the belongings lay damaged, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an stand, choosing not to let quiet and dust have the last word.

Transforming Sorrow

A photograph circulated digitally of a young artist who was died when missiles struck a building. Her poem went was widely shared with her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an elderly 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 remembrance. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: turning devastation into art, demise into poetry, grief into longing.

The Craft as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of ruin, I found myself rendering a fable 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 kept working until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all longed for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth pursuing.

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

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his prison cell, asking for more books, insisting that language study become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, hope, rigor, foundation, and analogy” all at once.

A Marked Legacy

And then came the photograph. I noticed it on a platform and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, damaged but intact, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, drained of life among the concrete 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 statement”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, 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 endure when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, stubborn refusal to be silenced.