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

In the wreckage of a destroyed structure, a solitary sight lingered with me: a tome I had rendered from the English language to Persian, resting half-buried in dirt and soot. Its jacket was shredded and dirtied, its leaves bent and burned, but it was still legible. Still communicating.

An Urban Center Under Bombardment

Two days earlier, rockets began striking the city. There were no sirens, just sudden, forceful detonations. The web was entirely disconnected. I was in my flat, working on a work about what it means to carry words across cultures, and the ethics and anxieties of taking on someone else's voice. As structures came down, I sat editing a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything halted. A project my publishing house had been about to publish was stranded when the facility closed. Bookstores 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 worrying about the library in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, hard-to-find editions I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Distance and Grief

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure locations – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the distance, a plant was on fire, thick smoke curling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and danger seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods passed over the city like a storm: swift terror, unease, righteous anger at the injustice, then detachment. Beyond the emotional toll, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick queries and materials that the work demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their sashes; at a family member's house, every window was destroyed, the furniture lay ruined, personal effects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, working at an easel, choosing not to let stillness and dust have the last word.

Translating Pain

A picture was shared digitally of a 23-year-old writer who was died when missiles struck a building. Her poem went spread rapidly alongside her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an elderly woman running between alleyways, calling a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some repressed remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: turning ruin into picture, loss into poetry, mourning into longing.

The Craft as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst ruin, I found myself working on a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted producing until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all yearned for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond literary craft: it was an act of perseverance, of remaining, 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 confinement, asking for more books, insisting that translation become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, goal, discipline, foundation, and analogy” all at once.

A Marked Voice

And then came the image. I spotted it on a website and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, scarred but intact, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, drained 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 seen – scarred, but enduring.

I stared 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 attack, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, determined refusal to be silenced.