Among those Bombed-Out Debris of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Volume I’d Rendered

Within the debris of a destroyed apartment block, a single image remained with me: a volume I had translated from the English language to Farsi, lying partly concealed in dust and soot. Its cover was ripped and stained, its sheets curled and burned, but it was still legible. Still uttering words.

A City During Bombardment

Two days before, projectiles began striking the city. There were no alarms, just sudden, violent explosions. The web was entirely disconnected. I was in my flat, working on a book about what it means to transport language across tongues, and the ethics and worries of occupying another’s voice. As edifices collapsed, I sat editing a text that suggested, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything ceased. A project my publisher had been about to publish was halted when the printing house ceased operations. Bookstores locked their doors one by one. One night, when the explosions were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, holding lexicons, hard-to-find editions I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my lifework, 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 less dangerous 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 distance, a factory was burning, dark smoke coiling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and danger seemed to pursue them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like a front: sudden terror, apprehension, moral outrage at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the personal impact, the bombardment destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and materials that the work demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the furniture lay broken, objects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, creating at an easel, refusing to let quiet and dirt have the ultimate victory.

Transforming Grief

A image was shared on social media of a 23-year-old poet who was died when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an elderly woman hurrying between passages, calling a name. People said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some repressed memory. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: transforming destruction into image, loss into verse, sorrow into quest.

The Craft as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of devastation, I found myself rendering a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet continued creating until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all yearned for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond an art form: it was an act of perseverance, of remaining, of enduring.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his prison cell, asking for more books, insisting that language study become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, goal, discipline, anchor, and symbol” all at once.

A Marked Voice

And then came the picture. I noticed it on a news site and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, marked but surviving, 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 concrete and ruins. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but persisting.

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 full weight 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 endure when everything else disappears. It is a subtle, stubborn refusal to vanish.