Amid those Bombed-Out Debris of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Book I Had Rendered

In the rubble of a destroyed building, a solitary sight stayed with me: a tome I had converted from English to Farsi, resting partly concealed in dirt and soot. Its cover was torn and dirtied, its pages curled and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating.

A Metropolis Under Assault

Two days before, missiles began striking the city. There were no sirens, just sudden, forceful detonations. The web was entirely disconnected. I was in my residence, working on a text about what it means to carry language across cultures, and the principles and worries of occupying someone else's narrative. As edifices came down, I sat editing a text that suggested, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of significance.

Everything halted. A book my publisher had been about to go to print was halted when the facility closed. Retailers locked their doors one by one. One night, when the booms were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the library in my apartment, stocked with lexicons, rare editions I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Dispersal and Grief

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous locations – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a photo: in the distance, a factory was on fire, black smoke coiling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods moved through the city like a front: sudden dread, apprehension, righteous anger at the unfairness, then detachment. Beyond the emotional toll, the attack destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant look-ups and materials that translation demands.

Outside, blast waves tore windows from their sashes; at a relative's house, every pane was broken, the furniture lay broken, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an easel, refusing to let quiet and dirt have the last word.

Translating Sorrow

A image circulated on social media of a young poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an elderly woman hurrying between passages, yelling 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 seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: turning ruin into picture, death into lines, mourning into longing.

The Work as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of destruction, I found myself rendering a fable about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet continued producing until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all yearned for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than literary craft: it was an act of resistance, of holding one's ground, of enduring.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his confinement, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that linguistic work become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, aspiration, rigor, foundation, and analogy” all at once.

A Marked Legacy

And then came the photograph. I noticed it on a news site and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, damaged but whole, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, stripped of life among the debris and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but enduring.

I stared at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a political act”, 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 erased. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, determined rejection to disappear.