Among those Bombed-Out Remains of an Residential Building, I Encountered a Book I Had Rendered

Within the debris of a destroyed apartment block, a solitary image stayed with me: a volume I had translated from the English language to Persian, sitting partially covered in dirt and soot. Its jacket was torn and dirtied, its leaves curled and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still uttering words.

A Metropolis Amid Attack

Two days prior, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, powerful blasts. The internet was completely cut off. I was in my residence, rendering a work about what it means to move language across tongues, and the morals and anxieties of taking on someone else's narrative. As edifices fell, I sat editing a text that argued, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything halted. A book my publisher had been about to publish was stranded when the printing house closed. Bookstores locked their doors one by one. One night, when the booms were too nearby, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the library in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, rare books I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Separation and Grief

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure 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 background, a plant was burning, black smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like a front: swift terror, anxiety, righteous anger at the injustice, then detachment. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate queries and references that translation demands.

Outside, concussive forces ripped windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every window was broken, the furniture lay damaged, objects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an easel, choosing not to let quiet and debris have the ultimate victory.

Translating Grief

A photograph was shared digitally of a young artist who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral with her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman running between alleys, yelling a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some deep-seated recollection. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: transforming devastation into art, demise into verse, mourning into longing.

Translation as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself working on a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet kept creating until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all desired – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth pursuing.

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

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his prison cell, asking for more resources, insisting that translation become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, hope, practice, anchor, and metaphor” all at once.

A Marked Work

And then came the photograph. I noticed it on a platform and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, damaged but intact, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, stripped of life among the concrete and ruins. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but enduring.

I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a act with consequences”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else disappears. It is a persistent, determined declination to vanish.