Within those Bombed-Out Remains of an Apartment Block, I Found a Volume I’d Rendered

Within the wreckage of a destroyed apartment block, a solitary image stayed with me: a volume I had rendered from the English language to Persian, resting half-buried in dirt and soot. Its front was torn and stained, its sheets bent and singed, but it was still readable. Still communicating.

A City Amid Bombardment

Two days prior, rockets started hitting the city. There were no sirens, just abrupt, violent blasts. The web was totally disconnected. I was in my flat, rendering a text about what it means to move language across cultures, and the principles and anxieties of occupying someone else's voice. As buildings came down, I sat revising a text that contended, in its quiet way, for the endurance of meaning.

Everything stopped. A project my publisher had been about to send to press was stuck when the printer ceased operations. Shops shut one by one. One night, when the blasts were too nearby, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, filled with lexicons, valuable volumes I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Dispersal and Loss

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous areas – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the background, a plant was on fire, thick smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and danger seemed to pursue them.

During those days, moods swept through the city like weather: instant dread, anxiety, righteous anger at the wrong, then numbness. 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 materials that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces blew windows from their casings; at a relative's house, every window was shattered, the possessions lay ruined, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, painting at an stand, declining to let stillness and dust have the last word.

Translating Pain

A picture was shared online of a young artist who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went viral with her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an elderly woman dashing between passages, yelling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some repressed memory. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: transforming ruin into image, loss into lines, sorrow into search.

The Work as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of ruin, I found myself rendering a fable about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet continued producing until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all longed for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond an art form: it was an act of defiance, of staying put, of holding on.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his confinement, asking for more resources, insisting that translation become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, aspiration, rigor, anchor, and analogy” all at once.

An Enduring Voice

And then came the image. I noticed it on a platform and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, damaged but whole, 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 invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – 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 forgotten. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, determined rejection to vanish.