Among those Bombed-Out Debris of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Volume I Had Rendered

Among the wreckage of a fallen apartment block, a particular image stayed with me: a volume I had rendered from the English language to Persian, resting partly concealed in dust and ash. Its front was shredded and stained, its sheets bent and scorched, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating.

A City During Bombardment

Two days earlier, missiles started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, powerful explosions. The digital network was entirely severed. I was in my apartment, translating a work about what it means to carry text across tongues, and the principles and concerns of inhabiting another’s voice. As edifices fell, I sat revising a text that contended, in its quiet way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publisher had been about to go to print was halted when the printer ceased operations. Shops shut one by one. One night, when the booms were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop thinking about the shelves in my apartment, stocked with reference books, hard-to-find editions I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Distance and Grief

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure towns – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a picture: in the background, a industrial site was ablaze, dark smoke coiling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to follow them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like a storm: swift dread, apprehension, righteous anger at the unfairness, then numbness. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant look-ups and references that the craft demands.

Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every pane was shattered, the possessions lay broken, household items scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, working at an stand, choosing not to let silence and dust have the last word.

Translating Pain

A image spread digitally of a young poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral with her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an older woman hurrying between alleys, yelling a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some deep-seated remembrance. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: changing destruction into picture, death into poetry, sorrow into quest.

The Work as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by ruin, I found myself working on a fable about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet persisted working until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all yearned for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than literary craft: it was an act of defiance, of remaining, of enduring.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his prison cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that linguistic work become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, hope, rigor, support, and analogy” all at once.

An Enduring Voice

And then came the photograph. I saw it on a platform and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, scarred but whole, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, drained of life among the rubble and debris. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but surviving.

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 full weight 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 endure when everything else falls away. It is a quiet, stubborn rejection to disappear.