Amid those Bombed-Out Remains of an Residential Building, I Found a Book I’d Rendered

In the rubble of a destroyed apartment block, a particular image stayed with me: a tome I had converted from English to Farsi, resting half-buried in dirt and soot. Its front was shredded and dirtied, its leaves bent and burned, but it was still legible. Still communicating.

A City Amid Bombardment

Two days earlier, projectiles began striking the city. There were no sirens, just unexpected, violent explosions. The internet was completely cut off. I was in my flat, rendering a book about what it means to carry language across languages, and the morals and concerns of inhabiting another’s narrative. As edifices came down, I sat revising a text that contended, in its understated way, for the persistence of meaning.

Everything stopped. A project my publishing house had been about to publish was stranded when the printer closed. Bookstores shut one by one. One night, when the explosions were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop worrying about the bookshelves in my apartment, filled with dictionaries, hard-to-find volumes I had spent years accumulating 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 make it through the night.

Separation and Devastation

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure towns – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the background, a industrial site was ablaze, dark smoke spiraling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and danger seemed to pursue them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like weather: swift dread, apprehension, moral outrage at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every window was broken, the furniture lay ruined, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, painting at an easel, refusing to let stillness and debris have the last word.

Translating Pain

A image was shared on social media of a 23-year-old poet who was died when missiles struck a building. Her writing went was widely shared next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an elderly woman hurrying between alleyways, calling a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some repressed memory. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: turning ruin into art, demise into verse, sorrow into search.

The Craft as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still amidst destruction, I found myself working on 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 kept creating until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all yearned for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than a skill: it was an act of defiance, of staying put, of persisting.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his prison cell, asking for more resources, insisting that linguistic work become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, goal, practice, foundation, and metaphor” all at once.

A Scarred Voice

And then came the picture. I noticed it on a news site and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, marked but surviving, my name printed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been black and white, drained of life among the debris and ruins. For most of my career, I had been invisible, 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 statement”, but I had never felt the full weight of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else disappears. It is a subtle, stubborn rejection to vanish.