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

Within the wreckage of a destroyed building, a solitary vision stayed with me: a book I had translated from English to Persian, lying partially covered in dirt and ash. Its cover was ripped and stained, its sheets bent and scorched, but it was still decipherable. Still uttering words.

An Urban Center Under Assault

Two days earlier, rockets began striking the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, powerful blasts. The digital network was completely severed. I was in my flat, translating a book about what it means to move words across languages, and the morals and worries of occupying a different narrative. As buildings collapsed, I sat revising a text that argued, in its quiet way, for the persistence of significance.

Everything stopped. A project my publisher had been about to publish was halted when the printer shut down. Retailers shut one by one. One night, when the blasts were too nearby, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop thinking about the library in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, rare books I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Separation and Grief

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be safer towns – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a image: in the background, a industrial site was on fire, black smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly somewhere else, and threat seemed to chase them.

During those days, moods passed over the city like a front: sudden terror, apprehension, moral outrage at the wrong, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick look-ups and materials that translation demands.

Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their sashes; at a family member's house, every pane was broken, the belongings lay ruined, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, creating at an easel, choosing not to let stillness and dirt have the ultimate victory.

Transforming Grief

A image circulated digitally of a 23-year-old artist who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her poem went viral alongside her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an older woman running between alleyways, calling a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some buried remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: transforming destruction into picture, death into verse, grief into quest.

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of devastation, I found myself rendering a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet kept working until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all yearned for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than an art form: it was an act of defiance, of remaining, of enduring.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his confinement, asking for more resources, insisting that language study become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, aspiration, rigor, foundation, and symbol” all at once.

A Scarred Legacy

And then came the image. I spotted it on a website and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, marked 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 debris. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but enduring.

I gazed upon 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 transport stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else disappears. It is a subtle, determined refusal to vanish.