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

Among the debris of a fallen apartment block, a solitary image stayed with me: a tome I had converted from English to Persian, sitting partly concealed in dirt and soot. Its front was torn and dirtied, its leaves curled and burned, but it was still readable. Still communicating.

A Metropolis During Bombardment

Two days before, rockets commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, violent detonations. The digital network was completely severed. I was in my residence, rendering a book about what it means to move words across tongues, and the ethics and concerns of occupying a different voice. As structures collapsed, I sat polishing a text that argued, in its understated way, for the persistence of purpose.

Everything ceased. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to go to print was halted when the printer closed. Retailers shut one by one. One night, when the booms were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop worrying about the library in my apartment, filled with dictionaries, hard-to-find 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 endure the night.

Dispersal and Devastation

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure locations – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a photo: in the faraway, a factory was on fire, thick smoke spiraling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and danger seemed to pursue them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like a front: swift dread, apprehension, righteous anger at the wrong, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick look-ups and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces blew windows from their casings; at a family member's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the furniture lay damaged, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an stand, refusing to let stillness and dirt have the ultimate victory.

Converting Sorrow

A picture was shared on social media of a young writer who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly alongside her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman running between passages, calling a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a conflict 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: turning destruction into image, loss into verse, sorrow into longing.

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by ruin, I found myself rendering a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can possess 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 reaching for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all yearned for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than a skill: it was an act of defiance, of remaining, of persisting.

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

A Scarred Legacy

And then came the picture. I saw it on a platform and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, scarred but intact, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been devoid of color, devoid of life among the concrete and debris. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – 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 true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, determined rejection to vanish.