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

Within the rubble of a collapsed building, a single vision lingered with me: a tome I had translated from English to Farsi, sitting partly concealed in dirt and soot. Its cover was ripped and smudged, its pages bent and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still uttering words.

An Urban Center Amid Assault

Two days earlier, missiles began striking the city. There were no warnings, just sudden, forceful detonations. The digital network was entirely disconnected. I was in my flat, translating a book about what it means to carry language across cultures, and the ethics and concerns of occupying someone else's perspective. As buildings collapsed, I sat editing a text that argued, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of significance.

Everything stopped. A project my publishing house had been about to send to press was stranded when the facility shut down. Bookstores closed one by one. One night, when the explosions were too nearby, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the library in my apartment, filled with reference books, hard-to-find books I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Dispersal 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 pulling out, she sent me a picture: in the background, a factory was on fire, black smoke curling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and peril seemed to follow them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like a storm: swift fear, unease, moral outrage at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the bombardment eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and references that the work demands.

Outside, blast waves tore windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every pane was broken, the furniture lay broken, objects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, painting at an stand, declining to let stillness and dirt have the ultimate victory.

Converting Sorrow

A photograph was shared on social media of a young writer who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her poem went was widely shared next to her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an older woman running between alleyways, yelling a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some repressed remembrance. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: turning ruin into art, demise into poetry, sorrow into quest.

The Craft as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself working on a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted producing until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all desired – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth reaching toward.

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

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his confinement, asking for more books, insisting that linguistic work become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, goal, practice, anchor, and symbol” all at once.

A Marked Voice

And then came the image. I noticed it on a website and saw that, amid 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 color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, stripped 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 apparent – 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 complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under fire, 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 remain when everything else falls away. It is a subtle, stubborn declination to be silenced.