Among the Bombed-Out Debris of an Residential Building, I Found a Book I’d Rendered
Among the wreckage of a destroyed building, a single image remained with me: a book I had translated from English to Farsi, resting partly concealed in dirt and ash. Its front was shredded and smudged, its sheets curled and burned, but it was still readable. Still speaking.
A Metropolis During Attack
Two days prior, projectiles began striking the city. There were no warnings, just sudden, powerful explosions. The web was entirely cut off. I was in my flat, working on a text about what it means to transport language across languages, and the principles and concerns of taking on another’s narrative. As structures fell, I sat editing a text that suggested, in its quiet way, for the persistence of significance.
Everything stopped. A manuscript my publisher had been about to go to print was stuck when the facility ceased operations. Retailers closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop thinking about the shelves in my apartment, stocked with lexicons, valuable editions I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That library was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.
Dispersal and Grief
My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be safer towns – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a picture: in the faraway, a factory was ablaze, thick smoke spiraling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and threat seemed to follow them.
During those days, feelings swept through the city like a storm: instant terror, apprehension, indignation at the unfairness, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the bombardment destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick look-ups and sources that the work demands.
Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the possessions lay broken, objects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, creating at an stand, choosing not to let stillness and debris have the final say.
Converting Sorrow
A picture spread online of a young writer who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an older woman hurrying between passages, shouting a name. People said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some repressed memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home.
We were all transforming, in our own way: changing destruction into picture, demise into poetry, grief into search.
The Work as Resistance
A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of ruin, I found myself working on a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound 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 striving for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all yearned for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth pursuing.
During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond an art form: it was an act of resistance, of staying put, of enduring.
One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his prison cell, asking for more books, insisting that linguistic work become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, hope, discipline, anchor, and metaphor” all at once.
An Enduring 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 printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, drained of life among the concrete and ruins. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but enduring.
I stared at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a act with consequences”, 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 transport stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, determined refusal to be silenced.