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

Within the debris of a collapsed apartment block, a particular sight remained with me: a tome I had converted from English to Farsi, sitting half-buried in dirt and soot. Its front was shredded and dirtied, its pages curled and scorched, but it was still readable. Still uttering words.

A Metropolis Amid Attack

Two days before, projectiles started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just sudden, forceful blasts. The web was totally disconnected. I was in my apartment, working on a text about what it means to transport language across tongues, and the morals and anxieties of taking on another’s perspective. As buildings fell, I sat editing a text that contended, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publisher had been about to publish was stuck when the facility closed. Shops closed one by one. One night, when the explosions were too nearby, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the bookshelves in my apartment, filled with reference books, hard-to-find books I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Distance and Grief

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous areas – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a picture: in the background, a factory was burning, thick smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and danger seemed to pursue them.

During those days, moods swept through the city like weather: sudden fear, apprehension, moral outrage at the wrong, then detachment. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate queries and sources that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their sashes; at a relative's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the furniture lay ruined, household items scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an easel, declining to let silence and dirt have the ultimate victory.

Converting Pain

A image circulated digitally of a young writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an aged woman running between passages, shouting a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: changing devastation into picture, demise into verse, sorrow into quest.

The Work as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst destruction, I found myself rendering 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 lost his sight yet persisted working until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all longed for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond literary craft: it was an act of resistance, of remaining, of enduring.

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

A Marked Legacy

And then came the picture. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, scarred but intact, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, stripped of life among the debris and ruins. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – 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 fire, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else falls away. It is a subtle, unyielding rejection to vanish.