Within the Ruined Debris of an Apartment Block, I Found a Volume I Had Translated

In the debris of a fallen apartment block, a single vision lingered with me: a book I had rendered from English to Farsi, resting partially covered in dust and ash. Its cover was torn and smudged, its pages bent and singed, but it was still legible. Still uttering words.

A Metropolis Amid Attack

Two days before, rockets began striking the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, powerful blasts. The internet was completely disconnected. I was in my flat, working on a book about what it means to carry language across cultures, and the morals and concerns of occupying another’s narrative. As edifices came down, I sat polishing a text that contended, in its quiet way, for the persistence of meaning.

Everything stopped. A project my publisher had been about to send to press was halted when the printing house ceased operations. Shops closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop worrying about the library in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, valuable volumes I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That library was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Separation and Grief

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure locations – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a picture: in the background, a factory was on fire, thick smoke spiraling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, feelings moved through the city like weather: swift terror, apprehension, indignation at the unfairness, then detachment. Beyond the personal impact, the bombardment eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their frames; at a relative's house, every window was destroyed, the possessions lay broken, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, painting at an stand, refusing to let stillness and dust have the final say.

Translating Pain

A photograph spread online of a young artist who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman running between alleyways, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some buried memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: changing destruction into picture, death into verse, sorrow into longing.

Translation as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself working on a fable 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 experienced the loss of his sight yet continued creating until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all longed for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than literary craft: it was an act of perseverance, 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 leader in his prison cell, asking for more books, insisting that linguistic work become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, goal, rigor, anchor, and analogy” all at once.

An Enduring Legacy

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

I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a political act”, but I had never felt the full weight of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else falls away. It is a quiet, stubborn refusal to be silenced.