Among those Bombed-Out Remains of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Volume I’d Rendered

Within the debris of a fallen apartment block, a solitary vision lingered with me: a volume I had translated from the English language to Persian, lying partially covered in dirt and soot. Its front was torn and stained, its pages curled and burned, but it was still legible. Still communicating.

A City Under Bombardment

Two days earlier, missiles commenced attacking the city. There were no sirens, just abrupt, violent detonations. The digital network was totally cut off. I was in my apartment, working on a book about what it means to move text across languages, and the principles and worries of inhabiting someone else's voice. As edifices collapsed, I sat revising a text that contended, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of significance.

Everything stopped. A project my publisher had been about to send to press was stranded when the printing house shut down. Shops closed one by one. One night, when the booms were too close, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, hard-to-find volumes I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That library was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Distance and Devastation

My spouse 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 plant was ablaze, black smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods swept through the city like a front: swift fear, apprehension, indignation at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the emotional toll, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their frames; at a relative's house, every window was broken, the possessions lay ruined, objects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an stand, declining to let silence and debris have the final say.

Transforming Sorrow

A photograph was shared digitally of a 23-year-old poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her poem went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an aged woman running between alleys, yelling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some repressed memory. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: changing devastation into art, death into lines, grief into quest.

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst devastation, 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 significant meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet persisted producing until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all yearned for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than a skill: it was an act of defiance, of holding one's ground, of holding on.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his prison cell, asking for more resources, insisting that linguistic work become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, goal, rigor, anchor, and symbol” all at once.

A Marked Voice

And then came the photograph. I saw it on a news site and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, marked but surviving, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, drained of life among the rubble and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but persisting.

I stared at 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 attack, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else disappears. It is a subtle, stubborn declination to vanish.