Amid those Bombed-Out Debris of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Book I Had Translated

Within the debris of a destroyed apartment block, a particular vision stayed with me: a book I had converted from English to Farsi, lying partially covered in dust and soot. Its jacket was torn and stained, its sheets curled and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still uttering words.

A Metropolis During Bombardment

Two days earlier, missiles began striking the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, powerful detonations. The web was totally cut off. I was in my apartment, working on a work about what it means to transport language across cultures, and the morals and concerns of inhabiting someone else's perspective. As edifices collapsed, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything halted. A project my publishing house had been about to go to print was halted when the printing house ceased operations. Shops closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop thinking about the shelves in my apartment, holding lexicons, rare books I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That library was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Dispersal and Grief

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure locations – 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 burning, black smoke curling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, moods swept through the city like a storm: swift dread, unease, moral outrage at the unfairness, then detachment. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and references that the craft demands.

Outside, blast waves ripped 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, painting at an stand, choosing not to let stillness and dirt have the ultimate victory.

Transforming Sorrow

A photograph was shared on social media of a 23-year-old poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her poem went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an elderly woman dashing between alleyways, shouting a name. People said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some deep-seated recollection. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: turning devastation into image, death into poetry, grief into quest.

The Craft as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst ruin, I found myself working on a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will get better 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 kept working until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all longed 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 perseverance, of holding one's ground, of holding on.

One day, in full 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 language study become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, hope, practice, support, and metaphor” all at once.

A Marked Legacy

And then came the picture. I saw it on a news site and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, scarred but surviving, my name printed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been black and white, devoid of life among the debris and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been invisible, 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 obliterated. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else falls away. It is a persistent, stubborn declination to disappear.