Amid those Bombed-Out Debris of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Book I Had Rendered

Among the rubble of a destroyed apartment block, a particular sight stayed with me: a tome I had translated from the English language to Persian, resting half-buried in dust and soot. Its cover was torn and stained, its leaves curled and scorched, but it was still legible. Still communicating.

A City During Attack

Two days earlier, rockets began striking the city. There were no sirens, just sudden, forceful explosions. The web was completely disconnected. I was in my flat, working on a book about what it means to move language across cultures, and the ethics and worries of taking on another’s perspective. As structures fell, I sat polishing a text that argued, in its understated way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to go to print was stranded when the facility shut down. Retailers shut one by one. One night, when the explosions were too close, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the library in my apartment, holding lexicons, hard-to-find editions I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Distance and Grief

My partner 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 departing, she sent me a picture: in the distance, a factory was burning, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and danger seemed to chase them.

During those days, moods passed over the city like a storm: sudden fear, unease, moral outrage at the wrong, then apathy. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and materials that the work demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every window was destroyed, the possessions lay damaged, household items scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an stand, choosing not to let quiet and dirt have the last word.

Translating Sorrow

A picture spread online of a 23-year-old artist who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her poem went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman dashing between alleyways, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some repressed recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

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

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst devastation, I found myself rendering a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will heal 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 kept working until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all yearned 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 perseverance, of remaining, of holding on.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his prison cell, asking for more resources, insisting that linguistic work become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, goal, practice, anchor, and metaphor” all at once.

A Marked Voice

And then came the picture. I noticed it on a platform and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, damaged but surviving, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, drained of life among the rubble and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but persisting.

I stared at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, unyielding rejection to vanish.