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

Among the rubble of a destroyed building, a single vision lingered with me: a volume I had rendered from English to Persian, resting partly concealed in dust and ash. Its front was ripped and dirtied, its sheets bent and burned, but it was still legible. Still communicating.

A City Amid Attack

Two days before, missiles began striking the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, powerful blasts. The web was totally disconnected. I was in my apartment, working on a book about what it means to transport words across languages, and the morals and concerns of inhabiting another’s voice. As structures fell, I sat polishing a text that contended, in its understated way, for the persistence of purpose.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publisher had been about to publish was halted when the facility ceased operations. Retailers shut one by one. One night, when the booms were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, filled with dictionaries, hard-to-find volumes I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Separation and Loss

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous towns – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a picture: in the background, a factory was on fire, dark smoke spiraling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like a storm: instant dread, unease, indignation at the wrong, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack 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, concussive forces tore windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the possessions lay ruined, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, creating at an stand, refusing to let silence and dust have the ultimate victory.

Converting Sorrow

A picture spread on social media of a 23-year-old artist who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an elderly woman hurrying between alleys, calling a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: turning ruin into picture, death into poetry, grief into longing.

The Craft as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst devastation, 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 significant 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 impossible. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all longed for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than literary craft: it was an act of perseverance, of holding one's ground, of holding on.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his confinement, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that linguistic work become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, goal, discipline, foundation, and analogy” all at once.

An Enduring Legacy

And then came the photograph. I spotted it on a website and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, scarred but whole, my name printed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been black and white, stripped of life among the debris and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but surviving.

I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a act with consequences”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else falls away. It is a subtle, unyielding rejection to be silenced.