Within the Bombed-Out Remains of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Book I Had Rendered

Within the rubble of a collapsed building, a particular image stayed with me: a tome I had rendered from English to Farsi, lying partly concealed in dust and ash. Its jacket was torn and stained, its pages bent and scorched, but it was still readable. Still communicating.

A City During Assault

Two days prior, missiles started hitting the city. There were no sirens, just sudden, forceful explosions. The internet was completely cut off. I was in my flat, working on a text about what it means to carry text across cultures, and the ethics and anxieties of taking on someone else's perspective. As structures collapsed, I sat revising a text that argued, in its subtle way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything ceased. A manuscript my publisher had been about to send to press was stranded when the facility shut down. Retailers closed one by one. One night, when the explosions were too imminent, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop worrying about the bookshelves in my apartment, filled with reference books, rare editions I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Separation and Devastation

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure towns – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a photo: in the faraway, a plant was ablaze, thick smoke spiraling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods swept through the city like a storm: instant fear, unease, righteous anger at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate searches and references that translation demands.

Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every pane was broken, the possessions lay ruined, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an stand, declining to let silence and dirt have the ultimate victory.

Transforming Grief

A photograph spread online of a 23-year-old poet who was died when missiles struck a building. Her poem went viral alongside her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an elderly woman running between alleys, calling a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some buried memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: turning ruin into art, death into verse, grief into longing.

The Work as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst devastation, I found myself rendering a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep 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 reaching for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all longed for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than an art form: it was an act of resistance, of staying put, of persisting.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his confinement, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that language study become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, goal, rigor, support, and analogy” all at once.

A Marked Work

And then came the picture. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, scarred but surviving, my name printed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, devoid of life among the concrete and ruins. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but persisting.

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 was important”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else falls away. It is a persistent, determined declination to vanish.