Among those Bombed-Out Debris of an Apartment Block, I Found a Volume I’d Translated

Among the wreckage of a destroyed apartment block, a solitary sight lingered with me: a book I had translated from English to Persian, resting half-buried in dirt and soot. Its cover was ripped and smudged, its leaves bent and scorched, but it was still legible. Still communicating.

A Metropolis Amid Attack

Two days prior, rockets commenced attacking the city. There were no sirens, just abrupt, violent explosions. The internet was completely cut off. I was in my residence, rendering a text about what it means to transport words across tongues, and the morals and worries of inhabiting someone else's perspective. As buildings came down, I sat revising a text that argued, in its quiet way, for the endurance of meaning.

Everything ceased. A project my publishing house had been about to send to press was stranded when the facility shut down. Shops closed one by one. One night, when the booms were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop thinking about the shelves in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, hard-to-find books I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Dispersal and Grief

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous locations – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a image: in the distance, a industrial site was burning, dark smoke coiling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly somewhere else, and peril seemed to chase them.

During those days, moods moved through the city like a front: instant dread, anxiety, moral outrage at the injustice, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate queries and references that translation demands.

Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the belongings lay ruined, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an stand, declining to let silence and dirt have the ultimate victory.

Converting Sorrow

A image was shared digitally of a 23-year-old poet who was killed 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 dashing between alleyways, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some repressed remembrance. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: transforming destruction into art, death into verse, mourning into quest.

The Craft as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of destruction, I found myself translating a fable about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet continued working until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth pursuing.

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

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his prison cell, asking for more resources, insisting that translation become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, goal, practice, support, and analogy” all at once.

An Enduring Voice

And then came the image. I noticed it on a news site and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, marked but intact, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, stripped of life among the debris and ruins. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but surviving.

I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, 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 persist when everything else falls away. It is a quiet, stubborn refusal to vanish.