Among the Bombed-Out Remains of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Volume I’d Translated

In the debris of a fallen structure, a solitary sight remained with me: a book I had translated from English to Persian, resting partly concealed in dirt and soot. Its jacket was shredded and stained, its sheets curled and burned, but it was still legible. Still speaking.

An Urban Center Under Bombardment

Two days before, missiles began striking the city. There were no alarms, just sudden, powerful blasts. The digital network was entirely severed. I was in my apartment, rendering a text about what it means to carry language across languages, and the principles and anxieties of occupying a different voice. As buildings fell, I sat editing a text that argued, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to publish was stranded when the printing house ceased operations. Retailers shut one by one. One night, when the explosions were too nearby, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, filled with dictionaries, hard-to-find editions I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Dispersal and Loss

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be safer locations – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a industrial site was burning, dark smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and threat seemed to pursue them.

During those days, emotions moved through the city like a front: sudden terror, anxiety, indignation at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the attack destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick queries and sources that the craft demands.

Outside, blast waves blew windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every pane was shattered, the furniture lay damaged, objects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an stand, declining to let quiet and dust have the last word.

Transforming Pain

A image was shared digitally of a young artist who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went was widely shared with her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an aged woman dashing between passages, yelling a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some repressed memory. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: turning ruin into art, death into poetry, sorrow into quest.

The Work as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of destruction, 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 deep meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted producing until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than an art form: it was an act of perseverance, of holding one's ground, of enduring.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his prison cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that translation become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, aspiration, rigor, support, and metaphor” all at once.

A Marked Work

And then came the image. I saw it on a platform and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, damaged but intact, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, devoid of life among the concrete and ruins. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but persisting.

I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else crumbles. It is a subtle, unyielding declination to be silenced.