Within those Bombed-Out Debris of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Book I’d Translated

Within the rubble of a collapsed apartment block, a single image remained with me: a volume I had translated from English to Farsi, lying partly concealed in dust and soot. Its cover was shredded and stained, its pages curled and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still uttering words.

An Urban Center Under Bombardment

Two days before, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no sirens, just sudden, violent detonations. The internet was totally severed. I was in my residence, working on a work about what it means to transport language across tongues, and the ethics and concerns of taking on another’s voice. As edifices collapsed, I sat editing a text that contended, in its understated way, for the endurance of meaning.

Everything ceased. A book my publisher had been about to publish was stranded when the facility ceased operations. Retailers shut one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop thinking about the shelves in my apartment, stocked with lexicons, valuable editions I had spent years collecting 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 survive the night.

Dispersal and Devastation

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure 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 image: in the background, a plant was ablaze, thick smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like a storm: sudden dread, apprehension, righteous anger at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick queries and references that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their frames; at a relative's house, every window was destroyed, the furniture lay ruined, objects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an easel, choosing not to let quiet and dust have the final say.

Translating Grief

A image spread online of a young writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her poem went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an older woman hurrying between alleyways, yelling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some repressed remembrance. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: transforming ruin into image, loss into poetry, grief into search.

The Work as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself working on a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of 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 calm we all yearned for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond a skill: it was an act of perseverance, of staying put, of holding on.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his prison cell, asking for more resources, insisting that translation become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, goal, rigor, support, and analogy” all at once.

A Scarred Work

And then came the image. I saw it on a website and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, damaged but surviving, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, stripped of life among the concrete and ruins. For most of my career, I had been unseen, 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 bombardment, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, stubborn refusal to disappear.