Within those Bombed-Out Debris of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Book I Had Translated

Among the rubble of a fallen apartment block, a single image stayed with me: a tome I had rendered from English to Persian, sitting partially covered in dirt and soot. Its cover was shredded and stained, its sheets curled and scorched, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating.

A Metropolis During Attack

Two days before, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just sudden, forceful blasts. The internet was completely cut off. I was in my flat, rendering a work about what it means to move text across cultures, and the principles and worries of inhabiting a different narrative. As structures came down, I sat editing a text that suggested, in its subtle way, for the persistence of significance.

Everything halted. A book my publishing house had been about to send to press was halted when the printing house closed. Retailers shut one by one. One night, when the explosions were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the library in my apartment, holding dictionaries, rare volumes I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Dispersal and Devastation

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure areas – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a photo: in the background, a factory was ablaze, thick smoke coiling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to chase them.

During those days, moods swept through the city like a storm: sudden terror, anxiety, righteous anger at the wrong, then detachment. Beyond the personal impact, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and materials that translation demands.

Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every pane was shattered, the possessions lay ruined, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an easel, declining to let stillness and dust have the last word.

Transforming Grief

A photograph circulated digitally of a 23-year-old writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went viral with her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an elderly woman running between alleys, yelling a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some repressed recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: transforming destruction into picture, loss into poetry, grief into longing.

The Work as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself translating a fable 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 lost his sight yet kept producing until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all longed for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than a skill: it was an act of defiance, of holding one's ground, of persisting.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his prison cell, asking for more books, insisting that language study become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, aspiration, rigor, foundation, and analogy” all at once.

A Marked Legacy

And then came the image. 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 intact, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, drained of life among the debris and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – 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 forgotten. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, stubborn declination to vanish.