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

Among the wreckage of a fallen structure, a single vision stayed with me: a volume I had rendered from the English language to Farsi, sitting partially covered in dirt and ash. Its cover was torn and smudged, its leaves bent and scorched, but it was still legible. Still uttering words.

A City Amid Bombardment

Two days earlier, projectiles started hitting the city. There were no sirens, just sudden, powerful detonations. The web was entirely cut off. I was in my residence, translating a book about what it means to move words across tongues, and the morals and worries of taking on another’s voice. As structures collapsed, I sat revising a text that suggested, in its quiet way, for the endurance of purpose.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to go to print was halted when the facility ceased operations. Shops closed one by one. One night, when the booms were too nearby, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop worrying about the library in my apartment, stocked with reference books, valuable volumes I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That library was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Distance and Loss

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous towns – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the distance, a industrial site was burning, dark smoke spiraling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, feelings moved through the city like a front: swift dread, anxiety, indignation at the wrong, then apathy. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and references that translation demands.

Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every pane was broken, the belongings lay broken, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, working at an easel, refusing to let stillness and debris have the last word.

Translating Grief

A photograph circulated online of a young poet who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her poem went was widely shared with her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman running between alleyways, yelling a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some buried remembrance. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: transforming devastation into picture, loss into lines, sorrow into search.

The Work as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself working on a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted working until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all longed for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward.

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 broad sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his prison cell, asking for more books, insisting that linguistic work become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, goal, practice, foundation, and metaphor” all at once.

A Scarred Voice

And then came the photograph. I saw it on a news site and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, damaged but whole, my name printed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, stripped of life among the rubble and ruins. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but enduring.

I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a act with consequences”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, determined rejection to disappear.