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

Among the wreckage of a collapsed structure, a single image stayed with me: a volume I had translated from English to Farsi, lying partly concealed in dust and ash. Its jacket was torn and stained, its pages bent and singed, but it was still legible. Still speaking.

A City Amid Attack

Two days prior, rockets started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, violent blasts. The digital network was entirely severed. I was in my residence, rendering a text about what it means to move language across tongues, and the principles and anxieties of inhabiting someone else's perspective. As buildings collapsed, I sat revising a text that suggested, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything halted. A manuscript my publisher had been about to go to print was stuck when the printer ceased operations. Bookstores closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the bookshelves in my apartment, stocked with reference books, valuable volumes I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Distance and Grief

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous 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 image: in the faraway, a factory was burning, thick smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, moods moved through the city like a front: instant terror, apprehension, moral outrage at the injustice, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and materials that the work demands.

Outside, concussive forces blew windows from their casings; at a relative's house, every sheet of glass was destroyed, the possessions lay ruined, objects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, painting at an easel, refusing to let quiet and debris have the final say.

Translating Pain

A image was shared digitally of a 23-year-old writer who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her verse went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an elderly woman running between alleys, yelling a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some repressed recollection. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: transforming devastation into art, demise into verse, grief into search.

The Work as Persistence

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 possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet persisted producing until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all desired – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than a skill: it was an act of resistance, of staying put, of holding on.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his prison cell, asking for more resources, insisting that linguistic work become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, goal, discipline, foundation, and symbol” all at once.

A Scarred Work

And then came the image. I noticed it on a website and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, marked but intact, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, devoid of life among the rubble and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but surviving.

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 full weight of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else falls away. It is a quiet, unyielding declination to vanish.