Among the Bombed-Out Remains of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Book I’d Translated

In the rubble of a destroyed apartment block, a single image lingered with me: a tome I had rendered from English to Farsi, resting partially covered in dirt and soot. Its front was ripped and stained, its pages curled and scorched, but it was still readable. Still speaking.

A City During Assault

Two days before, missiles commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just sudden, violent blasts. The web was entirely cut off. I was in my apartment, rendering a text about what it means to move text across languages, and the morals and concerns of inhabiting someone else's perspective. As structures collapsed, I sat editing a text that contended, in its subtle way, for the persistence of purpose.

Everything ceased. A book my publishing house had been about to send to press was stuck when the facility closed. Bookstores closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the library in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, rare volumes I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That library was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Separation and Loss

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be safer locations – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a photo: in the distance, a factory was on fire, thick smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly somewhere else, and danger seemed to chase them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like weather: instant fear, unease, indignation at the wrong, then apathy. Beyond the personal impact, the bombardment destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick look-ups and references that the work demands.

Outside, blast waves ripped windows from their casings; at a relative's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the belongings lay ruined, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an stand, refusing to let silence and dust have the ultimate victory.

Transforming Pain

A image was shared on social media of a 23-year-old writer who was died when missiles struck a building. Her writing went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman hurrying between alleys, yelling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some buried memory. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: changing ruin into image, death into poetry, grief into quest.

The Craft as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by ruin, I found myself working on a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet persisted working until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all yearned for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than a skill: it was an act of perseverance, 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 leader in his cell, asking for more resources, insisting that translation become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, goal, discipline, support, and analogy” all at once.

A Scarred Legacy

And then came the picture. I spotted it on a platform and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, scarred but surviving, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been black and white, stripped of life among the debris and debris. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but enduring.

I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else falls away. It is a subtle, unyielding declination to be silenced.