Amid the Bombed-Out Debris of an Residential Building, I Saw a Book I’d Rendered

Among the wreckage of a destroyed apartment block, a single sight lingered with me: a volume I had translated from the English language to Persian, resting partially covered in dust and soot. Its front was shredded and stained, its leaves curled and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking.

A City During Attack

Two days earlier, missiles started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just sudden, powerful explosions. The digital network was entirely cut off. I was in my flat, translating a work about what it means to move words across languages, and the morals and worries of taking on a different narrative. As buildings came down, I sat editing a text that contended, in its quiet way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything ceased. A manuscript my publisher had been about to send to press was halted when the facility ceased operations. Retailers 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 thinking about the library in my apartment, filled with reference books, valuable editions I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That library was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Separation and Devastation

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous towns – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a photo: in the faraway, a plant was burning, thick smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, moods passed over the city like a front: swift fear, unease, righteous anger at the injustice, then detachment. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and sources that the craft demands.

Outside, blast waves tore windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every window was shattered, the possessions lay broken, objects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, creating at an easel, declining to let quiet and debris have the final say.

Transforming Sorrow

A picture circulated 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 reference materials, I saw an older woman dashing between alleys, calling a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some repressed remembrance. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: transforming ruin into art, loss into poetry, sorrow into search.

Translation as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still amidst ruin, I found myself translating a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant 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 unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all desired – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth striving for.

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 bright sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader 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 fact, goal, practice, anchor, and metaphor” all at once.

An Enduring Legacy

And then came the image. I saw it on a news site and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, damaged but whole, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, devoid of life among the rubble and debris. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – 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 complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, stubborn rejection to be silenced.