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

Among the debris of a collapsed structure, a single vision remained with me: a tome I had rendered from English to Persian, sitting half-buried in dirt and soot. Its front was torn and smudged, its pages curled and burned, but it was still readable. Still speaking.

A Metropolis Amid Bombardment

Two days earlier, missiles started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, violent blasts. The digital network was totally disconnected. I was in my apartment, working on a work about what it means to carry text across tongues, and the morals and worries of occupying another’s narrative. As buildings collapsed, I sat editing a text that argued, in its subtle way, for the endurance of purpose.

Everything ceased. A project my publishing house had been about to send to press was halted when the printing house ceased operations. Shops locked their doors one by one. One night, when the explosions were too close, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the library in my apartment, filled with lexicons, rare editions I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That library was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Separation and Loss

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be safer areas – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a photo: in the background, a factory was ablaze, dark smoke spiraling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and danger seemed to pursue them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like weather: swift fear, apprehension, righteous anger at the unfairness, then detachment. Beyond the emotional toll, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and references that translation demands.

Outside, blast waves ripped windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the furniture lay broken, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, working at an stand, choosing not to let stillness and dirt have the last word.

Translating Pain

A photograph was shared online of a 23-year-old artist who was died when missiles struck a building. Her poem went was widely shared next to her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman dashing between passages, yelling a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some repressed remembrance. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: changing devastation into picture, death into lines, grief into search.

The Work as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by ruin, I found myself translating a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet persisted producing until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all longed for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth striving for.

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

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his cell, asking for more resources, insisting that language study become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, goal, discipline, foundation, and metaphor” all at once.

An Enduring Work

And then came the picture. I saw it on a website and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, marked but surviving, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been devoid of color, devoid of life among the rubble 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 gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else disappears. It is a persistent, stubborn rejection to vanish.