Amid the Bombed-Out Remains of an Residential Building, I Found a Book I’d Rendered

Among the wreckage of a fallen apartment block, a particular sight remained with me: a book I had translated from English to Persian, resting half-buried in dirt and soot. Its cover was torn and stained, its leaves bent and singed, but it was still readable. Still communicating.

A Metropolis During Bombardment

Two days earlier, rockets began striking the city. There were no alarms, just sudden, powerful blasts. The internet was totally cut off. I was in my residence, rendering a book about what it means to transport text across languages, and the morals and concerns of inhabiting a different voice. As edifices collapsed, I sat editing a text that argued, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of significance.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publisher had been about to send to press was halted when the printing house ceased operations. Bookstores locked their doors one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the library in my apartment, holding dictionaries, rare books I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That library was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Dispersal and Devastation

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be safer areas – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a picture: in the distance, a industrial site was ablaze, black smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly somewhere else, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, feelings moved through the city like weather: sudden dread, apprehension, righteous anger at the unfairness, then numbness. Beyond the psychological cost, the bombardment destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant look-ups and sources that translation demands.

Outside, concussive forces blew windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was destroyed, the furniture lay ruined, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an stand, refusing to let silence and debris have the ultimate victory.

Converting Sorrow

A image circulated on social media of a young poet who was died when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman hurrying between alleys, shouting a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some repressed memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: transforming destruction into picture, demise into verse, sorrow into longing.

The Work as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of destruction, I found myself rendering a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will get better 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 kept creating until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all desired – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth reaching toward.

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

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his cell, asking for more books, insisting that translation become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, hope, practice, support, and analogy” all at once.

An Enduring Legacy

And then came the image. I noticed it on a news site and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, scarred but whole, my name displayed 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 visible – scarred, but enduring.

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 complete significance 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 haul stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a subtle, determined rejection to be silenced.