Within those Bombed-Out Debris of an Apartment Block, I Found a Book I’d Rendered

Within the rubble of a destroyed building, a single image remained with me: a tome I had translated from English to Persian, lying partly concealed in dust and soot. Its jacket was torn and stained, its sheets curled and singed, but it was still legible. Still speaking.

An Urban Center Under Bombardment

Two days earlier, missiles began striking the city. There were no sirens, just sudden, violent detonations. The web was completely severed. I was in my apartment, working on a text about what it means to move text across cultures, and the principles and worries of inhabiting another’s voice. As structures came down, I sat editing a text that suggested, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to send to press was halted when the printer ceased operations. Shops shut one by one. One night, when the blasts were too nearby, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, filled with reference books, valuable books I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Distance and Devastation

My companion 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 departing, she sent me a image: in the distance, a plant was ablaze, thick smoke coiling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to chase them.

During those days, emotions moved through the city like weather: instant dread, unease, moral outrage at the wrong, then numbness. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate queries and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, shockwaves ripped windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every pane was shattered, the belongings lay broken, objects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an easel, choosing not to let stillness and dust have the ultimate victory.

Converting Pain

A image circulated on social media of a young artist who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her poem went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman dashing between passages, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some repressed memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: turning ruin into art, loss into poetry, sorrow into quest.

Translation 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 recover only if she can possess 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 striving for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all desired – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond an art form: it was an act of resistance, of holding one's ground, of holding on.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher 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, aspiration, practice, foundation, and symbol” all at once.

A Marked Legacy

And then came the photograph. I saw it on a news site and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, marked but intact, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, drained of life among the debris and debris. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but enduring.

I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a act with consequences”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, 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 falls away. It is a quiet, stubborn refusal to disappear.