Amid those Bombed-Out Debris of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Book I Had Translated

In the wreckage of a collapsed building, a solitary vision lingered with me: a tome I had rendered from English to Persian, lying half-buried in dirt and ash. Its jacket was shredded and smudged, its sheets bent and scorched, but it was still readable. Still communicating.

A City Amid Assault

Two days prior, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, violent blasts. The internet was entirely severed. I was in my residence, rendering a book about what it means to transport text across cultures, and the principles and anxieties of taking on a different perspective. As structures came down, I sat revising a text that contended, in its quiet way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything ceased. A manuscript my publisher had been about to send to press was halted when the facility shut down. Shops locked their doors one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the bookshelves in my apartment, holding lexicons, valuable books I had spent years collecting 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 Grief

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure areas – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a factory was on fire, black smoke curling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to chase them.

During those days, emotions passed over the city like a front: sudden fear, unease, moral outrage at the injustice, then apathy. Beyond the personal impact, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick look-ups and materials that the work demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the possessions lay damaged, objects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, painting at an stand, refusing to let stillness and dust have the last word.

Converting Grief

A picture circulated digitally of a 23-year-old writer who was died when missiles struck a building. Her writing went was widely shared with her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an elderly woman running between alleyways, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some deep-seated memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: changing ruin into art, demise into poetry, mourning into longing.

The Work as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of 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 profound meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet persisted working until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all longed for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth striving for.

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

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that linguistic work become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, aspiration, discipline, foundation, and analogy” all at once.

An Enduring Work

And then came the photograph. I noticed it on a platform and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, scarred but intact, my name printed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been black and white, devoid of life among the rubble and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but surviving.

I stared at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a political act”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else disappears. It is a subtle, determined declination to disappear.