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

Among the rubble of a fallen structure, a solitary sight lingered with me: a book I had converted from the English language to Persian, lying partly concealed in dirt and soot. Its jacket was torn and stained, its sheets curled and scorched, but it was still legible. Still communicating.

A City Under Assault

Two days prior, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, forceful blasts. The web was completely severed. I was in my flat, working on a text about what it means to move words across tongues, and the principles and anxieties of occupying another’s perspective. As structures fell, I sat editing a text that contended, in its quiet way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything stopped. A project my publishing house had been about to go to print was stranded when the facility ceased operations. Bookstores shut one by one. One night, when the blasts were too nearby, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, valuable volumes I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Dispersal and Devastation

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous areas – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the distance, a factory was burning, dark smoke spiraling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods passed over the city like a storm: swift dread, apprehension, righteous anger at the injustice, then apathy. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and references that the work demands.

Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their frames; at a relative's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the possessions lay broken, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, painting at an easel, choosing not to let silence and dust have the ultimate victory.

Translating Grief

A image spread on social media of a 23-year-old writer who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her verse went viral with her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman hurrying 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 deep-seated memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: changing devastation into image, loss into poetry, mourning into quest.

The Work as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of devastation, I found myself translating a fable 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 striving for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all desired – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond a skill: it was an act of resistance, of holding one's ground, of enduring.

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

A Marked Work

And then came the image. I saw it on a website and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, damaged but surviving, my name printed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been devoid of color, stripped of life among the debris and debris. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but persisting.

I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, 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 erased. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, determined rejection to disappear.