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

Among the wreckage of a collapsed apartment block, a single vision stayed with me: a book I had translated from English to Persian, sitting partially covered in dust and soot. Its front was ripped and dirtied, its sheets bent and burned, but it was still readable. Still speaking.

A Metropolis Under Attack

Two days prior, rockets commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, forceful explosions. The digital network was entirely cut off. I was in my apartment, working on a text about what it means to transport text across cultures, and the morals and anxieties of occupying another’s voice. As edifices fell, I sat editing a text that suggested, in its quiet way, for the endurance of meaning.

Everything halted. A manuscript my publisher had been about to go to print was stranded when the facility shut down. Shops locked their doors one by one. One night, when the explosions were too nearby, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop thinking about the library in my apartment, stocked with reference books, rare books I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Distance and Devastation

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous areas – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a photo: in the distance, a industrial site was ablaze, black smoke coiling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly somewhere else, and peril seemed to chase them.

During those days, emotions passed over the city like a storm: sudden terror, unease, moral outrage at the wrong, then detachment. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick searches and materials that translation demands.

Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their casings; at a relative's house, every window was broken, the belongings lay ruined, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, working at an easel, refusing to let stillness and dust have the ultimate victory.

Converting Grief

A photograph circulated online of a 23-year-old artist who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went spread rapidly alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman running between alleys, yelling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a war 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 converting, in our own way: changing destruction into art, death into lines, sorrow into search.

The Work as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst destruction, 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 aiming at the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all yearned for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than an art form: it was an act of defiance, of holding one's ground, of enduring.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his cell, asking for more resources, insisting that linguistic work become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, hope, discipline, support, and analogy” all at once.

A Scarred Legacy

And then came the image. I spotted it on a website and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, damaged but intact, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, devoid of life among the concrete and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but enduring.

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 attack, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else crumbles. It is a subtle, unyielding rejection to vanish.