Within the Bombed-Out Debris of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Book I Had Rendered

Within the rubble of a destroyed building, a solitary image remained with me: a volume I had translated from English to Persian, lying half-buried in dirt and ash. Its cover was shredded and smudged, its sheets curled and scorched, but it was still legible. Still speaking.

An Urban Center During Bombardment

Two days earlier, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just sudden, forceful detonations. The digital network was totally disconnected. I was in my residence, translating a work about what it means to carry language across languages, and the morals and worries of taking on a different voice. As buildings came down, I sat editing a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of significance.

Everything stopped. A project my publishing house had been about to send to press was stuck when the facility shut down. Shops shut one by one. One night, when the blasts were too nearby, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the bookshelves in my apartment, stocked with lexicons, valuable editions I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That library was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Separation and Devastation

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous towns – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a factory was on fire, black smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and threat seemed to pursue them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like weather: swift terror, unease, righteous anger at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant look-ups and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every pane was broken, the possessions lay broken, objects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, painting at an stand, refusing to let stillness and debris have the final say.

Transforming Pain

A image spread online of a 23-year-old writer who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went viral with her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an older woman running between alleys, yelling a name. Neighbours said she had mourned 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 devastation into art, demise into verse, grief into longing.

The Work as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still amidst ruin, I found myself rendering 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 continued creating until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all yearned for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than literary craft: it was an act of perseverance, of remaining, of holding on.

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

A Scarred Work

And then came the picture. I saw it on a platform and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, scarred but intact, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, drained of life among the rubble and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been unseen, 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 full weight of this until then. To translate, even under fire, 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 endure when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, stubborn declination to be silenced.