Among those Bombed-Out Debris of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Volume I’d Translated
Among the debris of a collapsed building, a particular vision remained with me: a tome I had translated from English to Persian, lying partially covered in dust and soot. Its jacket was torn and dirtied, its pages bent and burned, but it was still readable. Still speaking.
A City During Bombardment
Two days before, missiles commenced attacking the city. There were no sirens, just abrupt, violent blasts. The internet was totally severed. I was in my flat, rendering a text about what it means to transport text across languages, and the ethics and worries of inhabiting another’s voice. As edifices fell, I sat editing a text that argued, in its subtle way, for the persistence of meaning.
Everything ceased. A book my publishing house had been about to send to press was halted when the facility closed. Shops closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too nearby, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the library in my apartment, stocked with reference books, rare volumes I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.
Separation and Grief
My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure 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 photo: in the faraway, a factory was burning, thick smoke spiraling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly somewhere else, and danger seemed to chase them.
During those days, emotions passed over the city like weather: swift terror, unease, indignation at the injustice, then apathy. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and materials that the craft demands.
Outside, concussive forces blew windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every pane was broken, the possessions lay ruined, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, creating at an stand, refusing to let silence and debris have the last word.
Translating Sorrow
A picture was shared on social media of a young artist who was died when missiles struck a building. Her poem went spread rapidly alongside her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman running between alleys, yelling a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some repressed remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.
We were all translating, in our own way: changing devastation into art, demise into verse, sorrow into quest.
The Work as Resistance
A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of destruction, I found myself working on a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will get better 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 kept working until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all longed for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth striving for.
During those nights, I understood translation as something more than a skill: it was an act of resistance, of staying put, of enduring.
One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his confinement, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that linguistic work become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, hope, discipline, support, and metaphor” all at once.
A Marked Legacy
And then came the photograph. I saw it on a news site and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, damaged but surviving, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, stripped of life among the debris and ruins. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – 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 attack, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else disappears. It is a persistent, determined rejection to disappear.