Within those Bombed-Out Remains of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Volume I’d Rendered

Within the wreckage of a collapsed apartment block, a single vision lingered with me: a tome I had translated from English to Farsi, lying partially covered in dust and soot. Its jacket was ripped and stained, its pages bent and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating.

An Urban Center Under Bombardment

Two days earlier, projectiles began striking the city. There were no sirens, just abrupt, forceful explosions. The digital network was entirely severed. I was in my flat, working on a book about what it means to transport text across tongues, and the ethics and anxieties of taking on a different perspective. As buildings came down, I sat revising a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the persistence of meaning.

Everything halted. A book my publishing house had been about to go to print was halted when the printing house shut down. Bookstores locked their doors one by one. One night, when the booms were too close, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop worrying about the bookshelves in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, valuable volumes I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Separation and Devastation

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure locations – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a photo: in the faraway, a factory was ablaze, black smoke curling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and threat seemed to pursue them.

During those days, moods swept through the city like a front: sudden dread, unease, indignation at the wrong, then detachment. Beyond the personal impact, the attack eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick look-ups and materials that translation demands.

Outside, concussive forces ripped windows from their casings; at a family member's house, every window was destroyed, the belongings lay broken, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, painting at an easel, choosing not to let quiet and debris have the last word.

Converting Grief

A picture spread digitally of a young artist who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared with her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an older woman hurrying between alleyways, yelling a name. People said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some deep-seated remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: turning ruin into art, loss into lines, mourning into search.

The Craft as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself working on a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted creating until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all longed for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than a skill: it was an act of perseverance, of staying put, of holding on.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his prison cell, asking for more books, insisting that language study become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, hope, rigor, support, and symbol” all at once.

A Marked Work

And then came the photograph. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, damaged but intact, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, stripped of life among the rubble and debris. For most of my career, I had been unseen, 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 bombardment, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else disappears. It is a persistent, stubborn declination to disappear.