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

Within the rubble of a collapsed apartment block, a solitary image stayed with me: a volume I had translated from the English language to Persian, lying partially covered in dirt and soot. Its cover was ripped and smudged, its sheets curled and scorched, but it was still legible. Still speaking.

An Urban Center Under Assault

Two days prior, rockets commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just sudden, violent blasts. The internet was completely severed. I was in my flat, rendering a work about what it means to transport language across languages, and the morals and worries of inhabiting someone else's voice. As buildings fell, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its subtle way, for the persistence of meaning.

Everything halted. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to go to print was stuck when the printer closed. Retailers closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the bookshelves in my apartment, stocked with reference books, rare volumes I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Distance and Grief

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be safer towns – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a image: in the background, a factory was ablaze, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and threat seemed to pursue them.

During those days, moods moved through the city like a front: instant fear, unease, indignation at the injustice, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and references that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their casings; at a relative's house, every pane was broken, the possessions lay ruined, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, painting at an stand, choosing not to let silence and dirt have the final say.

Converting Grief

A image was shared online of a 23-year-old writer who was died when missiles struck a building. Her writing went spread rapidly next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman dashing between alleys, shouting a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some buried recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: transforming destruction into image, demise into verse, grief into quest.

The Craft as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself working on a fable about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet kept producing until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond literary craft: it was an act of perseverance, of staying put, of persisting.

One day, in broad 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 “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, hope, practice, foundation, and analogy” all at once.

An Enduring Voice

And then came the picture. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, marked but surviving, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, stripped of life among the debris and ruins. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but surviving.

I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a act with consequences”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, 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 endure when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, unyielding refusal to be silenced.