Amid the Bombed-Out Debris of an Residential Building, I Saw a Book I’d Translated

Within the rubble of a destroyed apartment block, a particular sight remained with me: a book I had converted from the English language to Persian, sitting partially covered in dust and soot. Its jacket was ripped and smudged, its leaves curled and singed, but it was still legible. Still communicating.

A City Under Assault

Two days earlier, missiles started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, powerful blasts. The digital network was totally disconnected. I was in my flat, working on a book about what it means to transport words across languages, and the ethics and anxieties of inhabiting a different narrative. As buildings collapsed, I sat polishing a text that argued, in its quiet way, for the persistence of meaning.

Everything ceased. A book my publisher had been about to publish was halted when the printing house ceased operations. Shops shut one by one. One night, when the booms were too nearby, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the bookshelves in my apartment, holding dictionaries, hard-to-find editions I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Dispersal and Loss

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure towns – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a picture: in the distance, a industrial site was burning, black smoke coiling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to pursue them.

During those days, feelings swept through the city like a front: sudden fear, anxiety, righteous anger at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the attack eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and sources that the craft demands.

Outside, shockwaves ripped windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was destroyed, the belongings lay broken, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, creating at an stand, declining to let quiet and dust have the final say.

Translating Grief

A picture circulated digitally of a young artist who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an older woman running 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 buried memory. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: changing devastation into image, death into verse, sorrow into longing.

The Craft as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself working on a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet kept working until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all yearned for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than an art form: it was an act of perseverance, of remaining, of holding on.

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

A Scarred Work

And then came the photograph. I saw it on a news site and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, damaged but surviving, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been devoid of color, drained of life among the concrete and debris. For most of my career, I had been invisible, 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 true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else falls away. It is a persistent, stubborn refusal to be silenced.