Among those Bombed-Out Remains of an Residential Building, I Found a Volume I Had Translated

Within the rubble of a collapsed building, a solitary sight stayed with me: a tome I had converted from English to Farsi, sitting partly concealed in dirt and ash. Its cover was shredded and stained, its sheets bent and burned, but it was still legible. Still uttering words.

A City Amid Attack

Two days before, projectiles started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, powerful blasts. The web was completely severed. I was in my residence, translating a text about what it means to transport language across cultures, and the ethics and worries of taking on another’s voice. As buildings fell, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publisher had been about to send to press was halted when the printing house shut down. Retailers locked their doors one by one. One night, when the booms were too close, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the bookshelves in my apartment, filled with lexicons, valuable editions I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That library was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Separation and Loss

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure locations – 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 background, a plant was on fire, thick smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like weather: instant terror, apprehension, indignation at the wrong, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate queries and materials that the work demands.

Outside, blast waves ripped windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was destroyed, the belongings lay damaged, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an easel, choosing not to let quiet and dirt have the ultimate victory.

Transforming Sorrow

A image was shared online of a young artist who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared with her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an aged woman dashing between alleys, shouting a name. People said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some repressed recollection. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: changing destruction into image, death into lines, sorrow into quest.

Translation as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, 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 deep meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of 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 tranquility we all longed for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth striving for.

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

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a facility; 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, aspiration, practice, support, and metaphor” all at once.

A Scarred Work

And then came the photograph. I saw it on a platform and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, marked but whole, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, 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 looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a political act”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, determined declination to be silenced.