Among those Bombed-Out Remains of an Residential Building, I Found a Volume I’d Rendered

In the debris of a destroyed apartment block, a particular vision lingered with me: a tome I had converted from the English language to Persian, sitting half-buried in dirt and ash. Its front was ripped and dirtied, its pages curled and scorched, but it was still legible. Still communicating.

A City Under Bombardment

Two days earlier, projectiles started hitting the city. There were no sirens, just unexpected, powerful explosions. The internet was totally cut off. I was in my flat, working on a text about what it means to transport language across cultures, and the ethics and worries of taking on another’s narrative. As buildings came down, I sat revising a text that contended, in its understated way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything stopped. A book my publisher had been about to go to print was stranded when the facility ceased operations. Shops shut 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, holding dictionaries, valuable editions I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Separation and Loss

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous locations – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a picture: in the distance, a industrial site was on fire, black smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and danger seemed to follow them.

During those days, feelings swept through the city like a front: instant fear, anxiety, indignation at the injustice, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant look-ups and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, shockwaves ripped windows from their sashes; at a family member's house, every window was destroyed, the possessions lay damaged, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an easel, declining to let quiet and debris have the ultimate victory.

Translating Pain

A photograph spread on social media of a young writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman running between passages, yelling a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a conflict 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 converting, in our own way: changing devastation into art, loss into poetry, sorrow into quest.

The Work as Defiance

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

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than a skill: it was an act of defiance, of remaining, of enduring.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his cell, asking for more books, insisting that linguistic work become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, hope, discipline, anchor, and metaphor” all at once.

An Enduring Voice

And then came the picture. I spotted it on a website and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, scarred but surviving, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, stripped of life among the rubble and ruins. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but enduring.

I looked at 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 fire, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, stubborn declination to vanish.