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

In the wreckage of a destroyed apartment block, a particular image lingered with me: a book I had converted from the English language to Farsi, resting partially covered in dust and soot. Its cover was ripped and dirtied, its sheets curled and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking.

A Metropolis Under Bombardment

Two days prior, rockets commenced attacking the city. There were no sirens, just unexpected, forceful detonations. The internet was entirely severed. I was in my flat, rendering a work about what it means to move text across languages, and the morals and worries of occupying a different narrative. As structures fell, I sat editing a text that suggested, in its subtle way, for the endurance of meaning.

Everything ceased. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to send to press was halted when the printing house closed. Shops shut one by one. One night, when the booms were too nearby, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, holding reference books, rare editions I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Dispersal and Loss

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure towns – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a photo: in the distance, a industrial site was on fire, thick smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to chase them.

During those days, emotions moved through the city like a front: sudden terror, unease, indignation at the unfairness, then detachment. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate queries and sources that the craft demands.

Outside, blast waves tore windows from their casings; at a relative's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the furniture lay damaged, objects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, working at an stand, declining to let stillness and debris have the final say.

Translating Pain

A photograph spread digitally of a 23-year-old poet who was lost 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 hurrying between alleyways, yelling a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some buried recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: transforming devastation into image, loss into lines, mourning into search.

Translation as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself working on a fable 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 experienced the loss of his sight yet continued creating until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all desired – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond literary craft: it was an act of resistance, of remaining, of holding on.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his cell, asking for more books, insisting that translation become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, aspiration, discipline, foundation, and analogy” all at once.

A Marked Voice

And then came the picture. I spotted it on a website and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, damaged but whole, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been black and white, stripped of life among the rubble and debris. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – 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 bombardment, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else falls away. It is a subtle, unyielding declination to be silenced.