Among those Bombed-Out Debris of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Book I Had Rendered

Among the rubble of a collapsed structure, a solitary sight stayed with me: a book I had converted from English to Farsi, lying partially covered in dirt and soot. Its front was shredded and dirtied, its pages curled and scorched, but it was still readable. Still communicating.

A Metropolis Amid Attack

Two days prior, missiles started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, powerful explosions. The digital network was totally cut off. I was in my apartment, translating a text about what it means to transport words across languages, and the principles and anxieties of taking on someone else's perspective. As buildings fell, I sat editing a text that contended, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of significance.

Everything ceased. A book my publisher had been about to publish was stranded when the printer ceased operations. Bookstores closed one by one. One night, when the explosions were too close, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, holding reference books, rare volumes I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Separation and Loss

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be safer towns – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a picture: in the distance, a plant was burning, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to chase them.

During those days, moods swept through the city like a storm: sudden terror, apprehension, righteous anger at the wrong, then numbness. Beyond the emotional toll, the shelling eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and references that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces blew windows from their casings; at a family member's house, every window was broken, the possessions lay damaged, objects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, creating at an easel, declining to let stillness and dust have the last word.

Translating Sorrow

A picture circulated on social media of a young writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly alongside her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an elderly woman running between passages, yelling a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some buried remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: changing ruin into image, demise into poetry, mourning into search.

The Craft as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst ruin, I found myself translating a fable about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet continued working until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all yearned 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 defiance, of remaining, of enduring.

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

A Scarred Work

And then came the image. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, scarred but surviving, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, stripped of life among the debris and debris. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but persisting.

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 true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, stubborn refusal to disappear.