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

Within the wreckage of a fallen apartment block, a particular vision remained with me: a book I had translated from English to Farsi, resting partially covered in dust and ash. Its cover was shredded and stained, its sheets bent and burned, but it was still readable. Still communicating.

An Urban Center Under Bombardment

Two days earlier, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just sudden, violent detonations. The digital network was entirely severed. I was in my residence, translating a book about what it means to move text across cultures, and the ethics and concerns of occupying someone else's narrative. As structures fell, I sat editing a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything halted. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to go to print was stranded when the printer ceased operations. Shops shut one by one. One night, when the explosions were too close, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop worrying about the library in my apartment, filled with reference books, rare editions I had spent years collecting 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 Grief

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be safer locations – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a picture: in the distance, a plant was ablaze, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and peril seemed to chase them.

During those days, moods moved through the city like a storm: instant fear, unease, moral outrage at the wrong, then numbness. Beyond the psychological cost, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and sources that translation demands.

Outside, concussive forces ripped windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every pane was destroyed, the belongings lay ruined, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, creating at an stand, refusing to let stillness and dust have the last word.

Transforming Pain

A photograph circulated digitally of a young poet who was died 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 alleyways, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some deep-seated recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: turning ruin into image, demise into verse, mourning into longing.

The Craft as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst ruin, I found myself translating a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet continued producing until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all yearned for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond a skill: it was an act of resistance, of staying put, of holding on.

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

A Marked Legacy

And then came the image. I saw it on a platform and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, damaged but surviving, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, drained of life among the concrete and ruins. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but enduring.

I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, unyielding declination to be silenced.