Among those Bombed-Out Debris of an Apartment Block, I Found a Volume I Had Rendered

In the wreckage of a fallen apartment block, a particular sight lingered with me: a book I had translated from English to Persian, resting half-buried in dirt and ash. Its cover was torn and stained, its sheets bent and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating.

A Metropolis Amid Attack

Two days before, missiles started hitting the city. There were no sirens, just sudden, violent blasts. The web was totally cut off. I was in my flat, rendering a book about what it means to move words across tongues, and the morals and concerns of inhabiting another’s perspective. As structures fell, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything stopped. A project my publisher had been about to publish was stuck when the printing house shut down. Shops shut one by one. One night, when the explosions were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop thinking about the bookshelves in my apartment, filled with dictionaries, valuable editions I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Distance and Loss

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous areas – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a picture: in the distance, a plant was burning, dark smoke coiling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, moods passed over the city like weather: sudden fear, apprehension, moral outrage at the injustice, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick look-ups and references that the craft demands.

Outside, blast waves ripped windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was destroyed, the possessions lay broken, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, creating at an easel, refusing to let quiet and dust have the final say.

Translating Grief

A photograph spread on social media of a young poet who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an elderly woman dashing between passages, yelling a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some repressed memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: transforming ruin into image, death into verse, sorrow into quest.

Translation as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of ruin, I found myself rendering a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet continued working until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all yearned for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond literary craft: it was an act of defiance, of holding one's ground, of holding on.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his cell, asking for more books, insisting that language study become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, goal, discipline, support, and analogy” all at once.

A Marked Voice

And then came the image. I spotted it on a website and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, scarred but surviving, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, devoid of life among the concrete and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been invisible, 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 statement”, but I had never felt the full weight of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a subtle, stubborn refusal to vanish.