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

Among the wreckage of a fallen apartment block, a particular image lingered with me: a volume I had translated from English to Persian, sitting partially covered in dust and ash. Its cover was ripped and stained, its leaves bent and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating.

A City During Assault

Two days prior, rockets started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, powerful detonations. The digital network was entirely disconnected. I was in my flat, rendering a book about what it means to carry language across cultures, and the morals and anxieties of taking on a different narrative. As buildings came down, I sat editing a text that argued, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of significance.

Everything halted. A book my publisher had been about to send to press was halted when the printing house closed. Shops closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too nearby, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, filled with reference books, rare books I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Dispersal and Loss

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be safer towns – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a image: in the distance, a factory was on fire, black smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and danger seemed to pursue them.

During those days, moods swept through the city like a front: instant dread, unease, moral outrage at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the personal impact, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and sources that the work demands.

Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their sashes; at a relative's house, every pane was destroyed, the possessions lay damaged, objects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an stand, refusing to let quiet and dust have the last word.

Translating Pain

A image was shared digitally of a young poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an older woman dashing between alleys, calling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some buried remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

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

The Work as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of devastation, I found myself rendering a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet continued producing until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all desired – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than an art form: it was an act of resistance, of holding one's ground, of holding on.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that translation become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, goal, discipline, foundation, and analogy” all at once.

A Marked Voice

And then came the photograph. I spotted it on a website and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, marked but surviving, 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 invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but persisting.

I stared at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a political act”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, 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 persist when everything else disappears. It is a persistent, unyielding rejection to vanish.