Within the Bombed-Out Debris of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Volume I’d Rendered

Within the debris of a destroyed building, a particular sight lingered with me: a tome I had converted from English to Farsi, lying half-buried in dirt and ash. Its front was ripped and dirtied, its sheets bent and scorched, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking.

An Urban Center Amid Attack

Two days before, missiles commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, powerful detonations. The web was totally severed. I was in my apartment, rendering a work about what it means to transport language across languages, and the morals and worries of inhabiting a different voice. As structures fell, I sat editing a text that suggested, in its subtle way, for the persistence of meaning.

Everything halted. A project my publisher had been about to send to press was stuck when the facility closed. Retailers closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the bookshelves in my apartment, filled with reference books, hard-to-find editions I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That library was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Separation and Grief

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure towns – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a industrial site was on fire, dark smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like a storm: sudden fear, anxiety, righteous anger at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the personal impact, the attack eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and references that translation demands.

Outside, blast waves blew windows from their sashes; at a family member's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the possessions lay broken, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, painting at an stand, declining to let quiet and dust have the final say.

Translating Pain

A image circulated digitally of a young writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an older woman dashing between alleys, calling a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some deep-seated memory. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: transforming ruin into art, loss into lines, grief into quest.

The Craft as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of devastation, I found myself rendering a fable about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound 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 impossible. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all desired – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth reaching toward.

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

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his prison cell, asking for more resources, insisting that linguistic work become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, hope, rigor, support, and analogy” all at once.

A Scarred Voice

And then came the image. I saw it on a platform and saw that, amid 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 devoid of color, drained of life among the concrete and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but persisting.

I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else falls away. It is a subtle, unyielding refusal to be silenced.