Amid the Bombed-Out Remains of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Book I Had Rendered

Among the wreckage of a collapsed apartment block, a particular vision remained with me: a volume I had converted from English to Persian, resting partly concealed in dirt and ash. Its jacket was torn and smudged, its pages bent and scorched, but it was still readable. Still uttering words.

An Urban Center Amid Attack

Two days earlier, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no sirens, just unexpected, powerful blasts. The internet was totally disconnected. I was in my flat, rendering a book about what it means to move words across cultures, and the morals and concerns of taking on another’s narrative. As edifices collapsed, I sat revising a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the persistence of meaning.

Everything ceased. A book my publishing house had been about to publish was halted when the facility shut down. Shops closed one by one. One night, when the explosions were too nearby, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, stocked with reference books, rare volumes I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Distance and Devastation

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 leaving, she sent me a photo: in the distance, a plant was burning, black smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to chase them.

During those days, feelings moved through the city like a front: instant fear, unease, moral outrage at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the attack destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant look-ups and materials that translation demands.

Outside, blast waves tore windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every pane was broken, the furniture lay ruined, household items scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an stand, choosing not to let silence and debris have the final say.

Transforming Grief

A picture circulated online of a young poet who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly next to her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an aged woman running between alleyways, calling a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a conflict 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: turning destruction into picture, death into lines, mourning into quest.

The Craft as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still amidst destruction, I found myself rendering a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted 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 beyond an art form: it was an act of perseverance, of remaining, of persisting.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that language study become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, goal, rigor, support, and symbol” all at once.

A Scarred Voice

And then came the picture. I saw it on a platform 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 colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, drained of life among the rubble 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 political act”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, determined declination to be silenced.