Amid the Bombed-Out Remains of an Apartment Block, I Found a Book I Had Rendered

In the rubble of a fallen building, a single sight remained with me: a volume I had translated from English to Farsi, lying partially covered in dirt and soot. Its jacket was torn and dirtied, its leaves bent and burned, but it was still legible. Still communicating.

An Urban Center During Assault

Two days prior, missiles started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just sudden, powerful explosions. The internet was entirely disconnected. I was in my residence, working on a book about what it means to transport language across tongues, and the principles and anxieties of inhabiting a different perspective. As structures came down, I sat polishing a text that argued, in its quiet way, for the endurance of meaning.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to send to press was halted when the facility shut down. Bookstores closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too nearby, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop worrying about the bookshelves in my apartment, filled with dictionaries, rare volumes I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That library was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Dispersal and Loss

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure towns – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a factory was on fire, thick smoke spiraling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and danger seemed to chase them.

During those days, feelings moved through the city like a front: instant fear, apprehension, righteous anger at the wrong, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick queries and sources that the craft demands.

Outside, blast waves tore windows from their frames; at a relative's house, every pane was shattered, the possessions lay broken, personal effects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an easel, declining to let quiet and debris have the last word.

Converting Sorrow

A picture circulated digitally of a young writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her poem went was widely shared next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an elderly woman running between alleyways, 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 recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: turning destruction into picture, loss into lines, grief into longing.

The Work as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself rendering a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet persisted producing until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all longed for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than an art form: it was an act of defiance, of remaining, of holding on.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his prison cell, asking for more books, insisting that language study become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, goal, discipline, foundation, and metaphor” all at once.

A Scarred Voice

And then came the photograph. I spotted it on a platform and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, scarred but whole, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, drained of life among the debris and debris. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but persisting.

I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the full weight of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, determined declination to vanish.