Amid the Bombed-Out Remains of an Residential Building, I Saw a Volume I’d Rendered

Among the wreckage of a destroyed apartment block, a particular image stayed with me: a tome I had converted from English to Farsi, sitting partly concealed in dust and ash. Its cover was ripped and stained, its sheets curled and singed, but it was still legible. Still communicating.

An Urban Center Amid Assault

Two days prior, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no sirens, just unexpected, powerful blasts. The internet was completely cut off. I was in my residence, rendering a work about what it means to transport text across languages, and the morals and worries of taking on another’s voice. As structures collapsed, I sat revising a text that contended, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything stopped. A project my publishing house had been about to publish was stuck when the printing house shut down. Retailers closed 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 bookshelves in my apartment, holding lexicons, hard-to-find 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 make it through the night.

Separation and Devastation

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be safer areas – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a picture: in the distance, a factory was on fire, dark smoke spiraling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods passed over the city like a storm: swift terror, apprehension, righteous anger at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the emotional toll, the attack eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant look-ups and references that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the possessions lay ruined, objects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, painting at an easel, declining to let stillness and dirt have the final say.

Converting Grief

A picture circulated digitally of a 23-year-old poet who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her writing went spread rapidly next to her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an elderly woman dashing between alleys, yelling a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: turning destruction into picture, loss into poetry, grief into quest.

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of ruin, I found myself rendering a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet kept 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 out of reach, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond an art form: 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 leader in his confinement, asking for more resources, insisting that translation become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, goal, practice, support, and analogy” all at once.

A Marked Work

And then came the picture. I noticed it on a website and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, scarred but intact, my name displayed 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 apparent – scarred, but persisting.

I stared at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a political act”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, determined refusal to be silenced.