Among those Devastated Debris of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Book I Had Rendered

Among the wreckage of a destroyed apartment block, a particular sight stayed with me: a tome I had rendered from the English language to Persian, lying partly concealed in dirt and soot. Its front was ripped and smudged, its pages curled and burned, but it was still legible. Still uttering words.

An Urban Center Under Bombardment

Two days before, rockets began striking the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, violent blasts. The web was completely disconnected. I was in my flat, rendering a text about what it means to transport text across cultures, and the principles and anxieties of occupying a different voice. As structures fell, I sat revising a text that argued, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publisher had been about to go to print was stranded when the printer closed. Retailers shut one by one. One night, when the blasts were too nearby, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, holding dictionaries, valuable books I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That library was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Distance and Loss

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be safer locations – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a picture: in the faraway, a factory was ablaze, dark smoke coiling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and threat seemed to chase them.

During those days, feelings moved through the city like a storm: sudden dread, unease, moral outrage at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick searches and sources that the work demands.

Outside, concussive forces ripped windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every pane was broken, the furniture lay broken, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, painting at an stand, declining to let stillness and dirt have the ultimate victory.

Translating Sorrow

A photograph spread digitally of a young poet who was died when missiles struck a building. Her writing went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an older woman hurrying between alleyways, yelling a name. People said she had lost a son in a conflict 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 translating, in our own way: turning destruction into picture, loss into verse, mourning into search.

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst devastation, I found myself rendering a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet kept producing until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at 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 beyond a skill: it was an act of defiance, of holding one's ground, of enduring.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his prison cell, asking for more books, insisting that linguistic work become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, hope, practice, foundation, and analogy” all at once.

A Marked Voice

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 translations, damaged but surviving, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been devoid of color, devoid of life among the debris and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but persisting.

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 bombardment, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a subtle, stubborn rejection to disappear.