Within the Devastated Remains of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Book I Had Translated

In the rubble of a fallen building, a solitary vision remained with me: a tome I had rendered from English to Persian, sitting partly concealed in dirt and soot. Its cover was torn and smudged, its pages bent and singed, but it was still legible. Still communicating.

A City Amid Attack

Two days before, missiles started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, powerful detonations. The digital network was completely disconnected. I was in my flat, rendering a book about what it means to move language across languages, and the principles and anxieties of occupying another’s perspective. As edifices collapsed, I sat polishing a text that argued, in its understated way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to send to press was stranded when the facility closed. Bookstores locked their doors one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop thinking about the library in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, valuable books I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Separation and Loss

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure areas – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the background, a industrial site was on fire, thick smoke coiling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and danger seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods moved through the city like weather: swift terror, apprehension, righteous anger at the unfairness, then numbness. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and sources that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces ripped windows from their casings; at a family member's house, every pane was destroyed, the furniture lay ruined, objects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, painting at an easel, refusing to let silence and dust have the final say.

Converting Grief

A image circulated on social media of a 23-year-old artist who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her writing went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an elderly woman hurrying between passages, shouting a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some deep-seated memory. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: changing destruction into image, demise into poetry, grief into longing.

Translation as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of devastation, I found myself rendering a fable about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound 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 unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond literary craft: it was an act of defiance, of holding one's ground, of holding on.

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

A Scarred Work

And then came the image. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, scarred but intact, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, devoid of life among the debris and ruins. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but enduring.

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 attack, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be obliterated. 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 disappear.