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

In the rubble of a fallen structure, a single sight remained with me: a book I had translated from English to Persian, sitting partially covered in dust and ash. Its cover was shredded and dirtied, its sheets curled and scorched, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking.

A Metropolis Amid Assault

Two days prior, rockets began striking the city. There were no sirens, just abrupt, powerful detonations. The web was entirely cut off. I was in my flat, working on a text about what it means to move words across languages, and the morals and concerns of taking on another’s voice. As edifices collapsed, I sat editing a text that argued, in its subtle way, for the persistence of meaning.

Everything halted. A book my publisher had been about to send to press was stuck when the printer ceased operations. Bookstores closed one by one. One night, when the booms were too nearby, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the shelves in my apartment, stocked with reference books, hard-to-find editions I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my lifework, 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 more secure locations – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a picture: in the distance, a industrial site was on fire, thick smoke coiling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like a storm: sudden dread, unease, indignation at the wrong, then detachment. Beyond the emotional toll, the attack destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, blast waves ripped windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the possessions lay ruined, household items scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, painting at an stand, choosing not to let silence and dirt have the ultimate victory.

Converting Sorrow

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

We were all translating, in our own way: changing ruin into picture, loss into poetry, mourning into quest.

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of destruction, I found myself rendering a fable about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted producing until the end of his life, understood something about striving 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 resistance, of remaining, of holding on.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his confinement, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that translation become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, goal, practice, foundation, and metaphor” all at once.

An Enduring Voice

And then came the photograph. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, scarred but intact, my name printed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, devoid of life among the debris and ruins. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but enduring.

I gazed upon 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 fire, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else falls away. It is a subtle, stubborn declination to vanish.