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

Within the debris of a destroyed building, a single vision remained with me: a book I had converted from English to Persian, lying half-buried in dirt and soot. Its cover was ripped and smudged, its sheets bent and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still uttering words.

An Urban Center Under Attack

Two days before, missiles began striking the city. There were no sirens, just unexpected, powerful explosions. The digital network was entirely cut off. I was in my apartment, rendering a work about what it means to carry language across tongues, and the ethics and anxieties of occupying a different perspective. As structures fell, I sat polishing a text that contended, in its subtle way, for the endurance of meaning.

Everything ceased. A project my publisher had been about to go to print was stranded when the facility shut down. Retailers locked their doors one by one. One night, when the explosions were too close, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the library in my apartment, filled with dictionaries, rare books I had spent years gathering 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 make it through the night.

Distance and Loss

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be safer areas – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a picture: in the distance, a factory was burning, black smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and danger seemed to chase them.

During those days, feelings moved through the city like a storm: instant fear, apprehension, moral outrage at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the emotional toll, the shelling eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and materials that translation demands.

Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their frames; at a relative's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the possessions lay ruined, household items scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, painting at an stand, declining to let silence and debris have the final say.

Translating Pain

A image circulated online of a 23-year-old artist who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her poem went viral with her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an older woman hurrying between alleyways, shouting a name. People said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some buried recollection. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: changing ruin into art, demise into verse, grief into quest.

The Craft as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst ruin, I found myself translating a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet continued creating until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than an art form: it was an act of perseverance, of staying put, of persisting.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that translation become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, hope, rigor, anchor, and analogy” all at once.

A Scarred Legacy

And then came the photograph. I noticed it on a platform and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, marked but whole, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, drained 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 apparent – scarred, but surviving.

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 true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under attack, 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 persist when everything else falls away. It is a persistent, unyielding rejection to vanish.