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

Among the wreckage of a collapsed apartment block, a solitary vision lingered with me: a tome I had rendered from the English language to Persian, lying half-buried in dust and soot. Its jacket was shredded and smudged, its leaves curled and burned, but it was still legible. Still uttering words.

A Metropolis During Assault

Two days earlier, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, forceful explosions. The web was completely cut off. I was in my flat, working on a work about what it means to carry language across languages, and the principles and concerns of inhabiting another’s voice. As structures came down, I sat editing a text that suggested, in its subtle way, for the endurance of meaning.

Everything halted. A book my publisher had been about to go to print was stranded when the printer ceased operations. Retailers closed one by one. One night, when the explosions were too nearby, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, filled with lexicons, rare editions I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Separation and Grief

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous towns – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a factory was burning, dark smoke spiraling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to pursue them.

During those days, moods passed over the city like a storm: sudden terror, unease, righteous anger at the injustice, then detachment. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces blew windows from their frames; at a relative's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the furniture lay damaged, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, painting at an easel, refusing to let stillness and dust have the last word.

Transforming Pain

A photograph circulated digitally of a young writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went spread rapidly alongside her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman dashing between passages, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some deep-seated remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: transforming ruin into image, loss into lines, mourning into search.

The Work as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst devastation, 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 kept creating until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all yearned for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth reaching toward.

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

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; 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, aspiration, practice, anchor, and symbol” all at once.

A Scarred Legacy

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 whole, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been black and white, stripped of life among the rubble and debris. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – 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 full weight of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, determined refusal to be silenced.