Among the Bombed-Out Debris of an Apartment Block, I Found a Volume I’d Rendered

Within the wreckage of a destroyed structure, a particular sight lingered with me: a tome I had converted from English to Persian, lying partly concealed in dust and soot. Its jacket was ripped and dirtied, its sheets bent and scorched, but it was still legible. Still speaking.

A Metropolis Amid Attack

Two days before, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, violent blasts. The web was entirely disconnected. I was in my residence, rendering a text about what it means to move words across cultures, and the morals and concerns of occupying someone else's narrative. As edifices collapsed, I sat polishing a text that contended, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publisher had been about to publish was stuck when the facility shut down. Retailers closed one by one. One night, when the booms were too imminent, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the library in my apartment, filled with lexicons, hard-to-find books I had spent years accumulating 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 make it through the night.

Separation and Devastation

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous towns – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a plant was on fire, thick smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, moods moved through the city like a storm: swift fear, anxiety, indignation at the unfairness, then detachment. Beyond the emotional toll, the attack eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and materials that the work demands.

Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their casings; at a family member's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the possessions lay ruined, objects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, creating at an stand, choosing not to let stillness and debris have the last word.

Transforming Sorrow

A image circulated digitally of a 23-year-old artist who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an elderly woman hurrying between passages, yelling a name. People said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried recollection. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

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

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by ruin, I found myself working on a story for young readers 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 creating until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all yearned for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth reaching toward.

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

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that linguistic work become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, hope, rigor, foundation, and symbol” all at once.

An Enduring Voice

And then came the photograph. I saw it on a website and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, scarred but surviving, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been black and white, devoid of life among the debris and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but persisting.

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 full weight of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, unyielding declination to be silenced.