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

Within the debris of a fallen apartment block, a particular sight stayed with me: a tome I had rendered from the English language to Farsi, resting partially covered in dust and ash. Its jacket was torn and smudged, its sheets curled and singed, but it was still readable. Still communicating.

An Urban Center Under Bombardment

Two days prior, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, forceful detonations. The web was completely disconnected. I was in my apartment, rendering a book about what it means to carry text across tongues, and the principles and anxieties of inhabiting another’s voice. As buildings fell, I sat editing a text that contended, in its understated way, for the endurance of purpose.

Everything ceased. A manuscript my publisher had been about to go to print was stuck when the printing house closed. Retailers closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop worrying about the library in my apartment, holding reference books, valuable editions I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Distance and Grief

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be safer towns – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a photo: in the faraway, a plant was on fire, dark smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly somewhere else, and threat seemed to chase them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like a front: swift fear, anxiety, moral outrage at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick searches and references that the work demands.

Outside, blast waves tore windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every window was broken, the furniture lay damaged, objects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, creating at an stand, choosing not to let silence and debris have the final say.

Transforming Pain

A photograph was shared online of a 23-year-old artist who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her poem went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman dashing between passages, calling a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried memory. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: turning destruction into art, demise into poetry, mourning into search.

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst devastation, I found myself working on a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet kept 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 pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than a skill: it was an act of defiance, of staying put, of holding on.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his confinement, asking for more books, insisting that translation become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, goal, discipline, support, and symbol” all at once.

An Enduring Work

And then came the photograph. I spotted it on a platform and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, marked but surviving, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, devoid 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 visible – scarred, but surviving.

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 erased. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, unyielding refusal to vanish.