Amid the Bombed-Out Debris of an Apartment Block, I Found a Book I Had Rendered

Within the debris of a fallen structure, a particular vision lingered with me: a book I had translated from English to Farsi, lying partially covered in dirt and soot. Its cover was shredded and dirtied, its leaves bent and scorched, but it was still legible. Still speaking.

A City Amid Bombardment

Two days prior, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, powerful explosions. The digital network was completely cut off. I was in my residence, working on a text about what it means to transport language across cultures, and the ethics and concerns of taking on another’s voice. As edifices collapsed, I sat editing a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything stopped. A project my publishing house had been about to send to press was halted when the printing house closed. Bookstores closed one by one. One night, when the explosions were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the bookshelves in my apartment, filled with lexicons, rare volumes I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That library was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Separation and Grief

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be safer areas – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a picture: in the faraway, a plant was ablaze, black smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions passed over the city like weather: sudden dread, anxiety, moral outrage at the wrong, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and sources that the craft demands.

Outside, blast waves ripped windows from their sashes; at a relative's house, every window was destroyed, the possessions lay damaged, objects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, creating at an easel, refusing to let stillness and dust have the last word.

Converting Sorrow

A image circulated on social media of a young writer who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman hurrying between passages, yelling a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some repressed recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: changing destruction into art, demise into verse, grief into quest.

The Work as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still amidst devastation, I found myself working on a fable about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet kept producing until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all longed for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than a skill: it was an act of resistance, of staying put, of holding on.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that language study become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, hope, discipline, support, and analogy” all at once.

A Marked Work

And then came the image. I saw it on a news site and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, scarred but whole, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, stripped of life among the rubble and ruins. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but surviving.

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 complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, determined declination to be silenced.