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

Among the rubble of a collapsed structure, a single vision lingered with me: a tome I had converted from the English language to Farsi, sitting half-buried in dirt and soot. Its front was shredded and smudged, its pages bent and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking.

A City Amid Assault

Two days before, rockets started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, violent blasts. The web was entirely disconnected. I was in my apartment, working on a book about what it means to carry words across languages, and the principles and concerns of taking on another’s voice. As edifices fell, I sat polishing a text that contended, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything ceased. A manuscript my publisher had been about to publish was stranded when the facility ceased operations. Bookstores shut one by one. One night, when the booms were too nearby, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the bookshelves in my apartment, filled with dictionaries, valuable volumes I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Dispersal and Loss

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be safer towns – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a picture: in the distance, a factory was ablaze, thick smoke spiraling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to pursue them.

During those days, feelings moved through the city like a front: instant fear, apprehension, righteous anger at the wrong, then numbness. Beyond the emotional toll, the shelling eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and materials that translation demands.

Outside, blast waves tore windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every pane was broken, the furniture lay broken, household items scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, working at an stand, declining to let silence and dust have the final say.

Transforming Pain

A photograph spread online of a young poet who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her verse went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an older woman running between alleyways, shouting a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some deep-seated remembrance. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: transforming devastation into art, demise into poetry, mourning into search.

The Work as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself working on a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet continued producing until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all longed for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond literary craft: it was an act of perseverance, of staying put, of holding on.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his cell, asking for more resources, insisting that language study become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, aspiration, rigor, foundation, and analogy” all at once.

A Marked Work

And then came the photograph. I saw it on a news site and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, marked but intact, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, drained of life among the rubble and debris. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but enduring.

I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a act with consequences”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else falls away. It is a quiet, unyielding rejection to disappear.