Within the Bombed-Out Debris of an Residential Building, I Saw a Book I’d Translated

In the debris of a destroyed apartment block, a particular vision stayed with me: a book I had converted from English to Farsi, sitting partially covered in dirt and ash. Its cover was torn and dirtied, its pages curled and scorched, but it was still legible. Still uttering words.

An Urban Center Under Attack

Two days earlier, rockets began striking the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, violent blasts. The web was totally disconnected. I was in my residence, working on a book about what it means to move text across cultures, and the ethics and worries of inhabiting a different narrative. As buildings fell, I sat editing a text that argued, in its quiet way, for the endurance of meaning.

Everything halted. A project my publishing house had been about to go to print was halted when the printer closed. Retailers shut one by one. One night, when the booms were too imminent, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the bookshelves in my apartment, filled with dictionaries, hard-to-find editions I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Separation and Grief

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure areas – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a picture: in the background, a plant was on fire, dark smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to chase them.

During those days, emotions moved through the city like weather: swift fear, unease, righteous anger at the unfairness, then numbness. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate searches and references that translation demands.

Outside, shockwaves ripped windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every pane was broken, the possessions lay damaged, personal effects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, painting at an easel, refusing to let silence and dust have the final say.

Transforming Pain

A photograph circulated on social media of a 23-year-old artist who was died when missiles struck a building. Her writing went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman running between alleys, yelling a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some deep-seated memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: changing ruin into art, death into verse, mourning into search.

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of ruin, I found myself rendering a fable 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 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 yearned for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than an art form: it was an act of resistance, of staying put, of persisting.

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

A Marked Voice

And then came the image. I spotted it on a platform and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, damaged but surviving, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, stripped of life among the concrete and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been invisible, 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 complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else disappears. It is a subtle, unyielding refusal to disappear.