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

Within the rubble of a destroyed apartment block, a single vision lingered with me: a volume I had rendered from English to Persian, lying half-buried in dirt and ash. Its front was shredded and stained, its leaves curled and burned, but it was still legible. Still speaking.

A Metropolis During Bombardment

Two days prior, missiles commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, forceful detonations. The digital network was entirely disconnected. I was in my apartment, rendering a work about what it means to carry language across tongues, and the ethics and worries of inhabiting a different voice. As edifices collapsed, I sat polishing a text that contended, in its subtle way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything stopped. A book my publishing house had been about to publish was halted when the printing house closed. Shops shut one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, stocked with lexicons, rare books I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That library was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Dispersal and Grief

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure towns – 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 photo: in the distance, a industrial site was ablaze, dark smoke spiraling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and danger seemed to chase them.

During those days, moods moved through the city like weather: swift terror, unease, moral outrage at the wrong, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate searches and materials that the work demands.

Outside, blast waves ripped windows from their frames; at a relative's house, every window was destroyed, the belongings lay ruined, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, working at an stand, declining to let quiet and dirt have the final say.

Translating Pain

A image spread on social media of a young writer who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an older woman dashing between alleys, calling a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some buried memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: turning devastation into picture, death into lines, mourning into search.

The Work as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of destruction, I found myself working on a story for young readers 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 lost his sight yet kept working until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than literary craft: it was an act of resistance, of staying put, of enduring.

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

A Scarred Legacy

And then came the image. I noticed it on a website and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, marked but intact, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, devoid of life among the rubble and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but surviving.

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 attack, 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 falls away. It is a persistent, stubborn declination to disappear.