Within the Bombed-Out Remains of an Residential Building, I Found a Volume I Had Translated

Among the wreckage of a collapsed building, a solitary vision stayed with me: a volume I had translated from English to Farsi, resting partly concealed in dirt and ash. Its front was shredded and smudged, its pages bent and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating.

A Metropolis Under Assault

Two days earlier, projectiles started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, powerful blasts. The digital network was entirely cut off. I was in my apartment, rendering a work about what it means to transport words across languages, and the ethics and concerns of inhabiting a different perspective. As edifices collapsed, I sat revising a text that suggested, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything halted. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to send to press was halted when the printer ceased operations. Retailers 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 worrying about the library in my apartment, stocked with lexicons, rare volumes I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Distance and Devastation

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be safer locations – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the background, a industrial site was on fire, black smoke coiling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and danger seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions moved through the city like weather: sudden dread, unease, moral outrage at the wrong, then apathy. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate queries and references that the work demands.

Outside, concussive forces ripped windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every pane was broken, the belongings lay ruined, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, painting at an stand, choosing not to let silence and dust have the ultimate victory.

Transforming Pain

A image circulated on social media of a 23-year-old artist who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her writing went spread rapidly alongside her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an elderly woman hurrying between alleyways, yelling a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some repressed recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: transforming devastation into picture, loss into poetry, grief into quest.

Translation as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still amidst destruction, I found myself working on a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet continued creating until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all longed for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth striving for.

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

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

An Enduring Voice

And then came the photograph. I saw it on a website and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, marked but intact, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been devoid of color, stripped of life among the rubble and ruins. 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 political act”, but I had never felt the full weight of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, stubborn refusal to disappear.