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

Within the wreckage of a collapsed structure, a solitary sight lingered with me: a tome I had converted from English to Persian, lying partly concealed in dust and ash. Its cover was torn and smudged, its leaves curled and singed, but it was still readable. Still uttering words.

A Metropolis During Assault

Two days prior, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, powerful blasts. The internet was completely disconnected. I was in my residence, rendering a text about what it means to carry text across languages, and the morals and concerns of inhabiting another’s voice. As buildings came down, I sat editing a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the persistence of meaning.

Everything ceased. A project my publisher had been about to publish was halted when the printer closed. Retailers locked their doors one by one. One night, when the booms were too nearby, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the shelves in my apartment, filled with reference books, hard-to-find books I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That library was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Distance and Devastation

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be safer areas – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a picture: in the faraway, a factory was on fire, black smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly somewhere else, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, moods passed over the city like a front: sudden fear, anxiety, moral outrage at the wrong, then numbness. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and references that the work demands.

Outside, shockwaves ripped windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every window was broken, the furniture lay broken, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an stand, choosing not to let quiet and dirt have the final say.

Transforming Grief

A picture 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 dictionaries, I saw an aged woman dashing between alleys, calling a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some deep-seated remembrance. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: changing devastation into image, loss into poetry, mourning into quest.

The Craft as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of destruction, I found myself rendering a fable about a king whose daughter will get better 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 creating until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all longed 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 resistance, of holding one's ground, of enduring.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his prison cell, asking for more books, insisting that translation become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, hope, practice, foundation, and analogy” all at once.

A Marked Voice

And then came the image. I spotted it on a platform and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, damaged but intact, my name displayed 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 ruins. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but enduring.

I stared 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 attack, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else disappears. It is a persistent, unyielding declination to vanish.