Amid the Bombed-Out Remains of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Book I Had Rendered

In the wreckage of a collapsed apartment block, a single sight remained with me: a volume I had converted from the English language to Farsi, sitting partly concealed in dust and soot. Its jacket was shredded and stained, its sheets curled and scorched, but it was still readable. Still uttering words.

A City During Attack

Two days prior, missiles began striking the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, forceful explosions. The web was completely disconnected. I was in my apartment, rendering a book about what it means to transport words across cultures, and the ethics and anxieties of inhabiting another’s perspective. As structures fell, I sat polishing a text that argued, in its subtle way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything ceased. A book my publisher had been about to send to press was stranded when the printer shut down. 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 shelves in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, hard-to-find editions I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Dispersal and Loss

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous areas – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a image: in the background, a factory was ablaze, dark smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly far away, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods passed over the city like a front: instant fear, apprehension, moral outrage at the unfairness, then detachment. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate searches and materials that translation demands.

Outside, shockwaves ripped windows from their sashes; at a family member's house, every pane was broken, the belongings lay broken, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an stand, declining to let silence and dirt have the final say.

Transforming Pain

A image circulated digitally of a young poet who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her poem went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an aged woman dashing between alleyways, calling a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some repressed remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: turning destruction into image, demise into verse, grief into search.

The Craft as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of destruction, I found myself working on a fable 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 creating until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all longed for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than an art form: it was an act of resistance, of remaining, of holding on.

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

A Scarred Legacy

And then came the photograph. I saw it on a website and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, scarred but surviving, my name printed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been devoid of color, 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 visible – scarred, but surviving.

I stared at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a political act”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else falls away. It is a subtle, determined rejection to be silenced.