Among the Bombed-Out Remains of an Residential Building, I Found a Book I Had Rendered

Among the rubble of a fallen building, a solitary vision stayed with me: a volume I had converted from English to Farsi, sitting partially covered in dirt and soot. Its cover was torn and dirtied, its leaves curled and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating.

A Metropolis During Bombardment

Two days earlier, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, powerful explosions. The web was completely cut off. I was in my apartment, translating a text about what it means to move language across cultures, and the principles and anxieties of occupying someone else's perspective. As buildings came down, I sat polishing a text that contended, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything ceased. A manuscript my publisher had been about to send to press was stranded when the facility shut down. Bookstores locked their doors one by one. One night, when the explosions were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the bookshelves in my apartment, stocked with reference books, rare volumes I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Separation and Loss

My companion 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 departing, she sent me a photo: in the background, a plant was on fire, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly elsewhere, and danger seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions moved through the city like a storm: swift terror, anxiety, moral outrage at the wrong, then apathy. Beyond the personal impact, the attack destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and references that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their sashes; at a family member's house, every pane was shattered, the belongings lay damaged, objects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, creating at an stand, declining to let stillness and debris have the last word.

Converting Grief

A photograph circulated online of a 23-year-old writer who was died when missiles struck a building. Her poem went spread rapidly next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an elderly woman hurrying between alleyways, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some repressed memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: changing destruction into art, death into lines, grief into longing.

The Work as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of ruin, I found myself translating a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted working until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all longed for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than a skill: it was an act of resistance, of staying put, of enduring.

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 resources, insisting that language study become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, aspiration, practice, support, and metaphor” all at once.

An Enduring Voice

And then came the photograph. I spotted it on a platform and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, scarred but whole, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been devoid of color, devoid of life among the concrete and debris. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – 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 full weight of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else disappears. It is a persistent, stubborn refusal to vanish.