Among those Bombed-Out Debris of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Volume I Had Translated

In the wreckage of a destroyed structure, a single vision stayed with me: a volume I had translated from the English language to Persian, sitting partly concealed in dust and soot. Its cover was torn and dirtied, its leaves bent and scorched, but it was still readable. Still uttering words.

A Metropolis Amid Bombardment

Two days prior, rockets began striking the city. There were no sirens, just abrupt, powerful explosions. The web was completely cut off. I was in my apartment, rendering a work about what it means to carry text across tongues, and the principles and anxieties of occupying a different perspective. As structures came down, I sat editing a text that contended, in its subtle way, for the endurance of purpose.

Everything halted. A book my publisher had been about to send to press was stuck when the printer ceased operations. Bookstores shut one by one. One night, when the booms were too close, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the bookshelves in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, hard-to-find editions I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That library was my lifework, 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 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 factory was ablaze, thick smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly far away, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like weather: instant fear, anxiety, moral outrage at the unfairness, then detachment. Beyond the emotional toll, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and references that the craft demands.

Outside, blast waves ripped windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every pane was destroyed, the possessions lay ruined, objects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, painting at an stand, choosing not to let quiet and dirt have the final say.

Translating Sorrow

A picture spread online of a 23-year-old artist who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her poem went viral alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an elderly woman dashing between passages, shouting a name. People said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some repressed remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: turning devastation into image, loss into poetry, grief into search.

The Work as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of destruction, I found myself working on a fable about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet persisted creating until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for 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 greater than literary craft: it was an act of perseverance, of staying put, of enduring.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his prison cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that language study become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, goal, discipline, support, and metaphor” all at once.

An Enduring Legacy

And then came the photograph. I noticed it on a platform and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, marked but intact, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, stripped of life among the concrete and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but enduring.

I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a act with consequences”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, determined refusal to vanish.