Among the Bombed-Out Remains of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Volume I Had Rendered

In the debris of a fallen structure, a particular image lingered with me: a volume I had rendered from the English language to Persian, sitting half-buried in dirt and ash. Its front was shredded and dirtied, its sheets bent and burned, but it was still readable. Still speaking.

A City During Assault

Two days before, rockets commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just sudden, violent blasts. The digital network was completely cut off. I was in my flat, rendering a work about what it means to carry words across languages, and the ethics and worries of inhabiting 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 publishing house had been about to go to print was stranded when the facility ceased operations. Shops closed one by one. One night, when the explosions were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the library in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, rare editions I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Distance and Devastation

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure towns – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a image: in the background, a factory was on fire, dark smoke spiraling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like weather: sudden dread, unease, moral outrage at the injustice, then apathy. Beyond the personal impact, the bombardment destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces ripped windows from their casings; at a family member's house, every pane was broken, the possessions lay damaged, objects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an easel, declining to let stillness and dust have the last word.

Converting Grief

A picture circulated digitally of a 23-year-old poet who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her poem went viral alongside her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an elderly woman dashing between alleyways, calling a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some buried memory. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: transforming ruin into picture, loss into lines, sorrow into search.

Translation as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of ruin, 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 deep meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet continued working until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all longed for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth pursuing.

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

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

A Marked Work

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 translations, scarred but surviving, my name printed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been black and white, drained of life among the concrete and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but enduring.

I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a political act”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, determined refusal to be silenced.