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

Within the debris of a fallen apartment block, a single vision stayed with me: a tome I had rendered from English to Farsi, sitting half-buried in dirt and soot. Its cover was torn and stained, its leaves bent and scorched, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking.

A City Amid Assault

Two days before, rockets commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, violent detonations. The digital network was completely severed. I was in my residence, translating a text about what it means to carry text across cultures, and the principles and anxieties of occupying a different perspective. As structures collapsed, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its subtle way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything halted. A book my publisher had been about to go to print was stuck when the printing house shut down. Retailers locked their doors one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the library in my apartment, holding lexicons, hard-to-find volumes I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Distance 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 went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a picture: in the faraway, a plant was burning, thick smoke coiling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to pursue them.

During those days, feelings swept through the city like a front: instant dread, unease, moral outrage at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the emotional toll, the attack destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and materials that the work demands.

Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their sashes; at a family member's house, every pane was shattered, the belongings lay damaged, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, painting at an stand, declining to let stillness and dirt have the final say.

Converting Pain

A image circulated digitally of a 23-year-old artist who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an elderly woman dashing between alleyways, calling a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some deep-seated recollection. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: transforming ruin into art, demise into poetry, mourning into longing.

The Work as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still amidst ruin, 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 kept working until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all yearned for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward.

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

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his cell, asking for more books, insisting that linguistic work become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, aspiration, rigor, anchor, and symbol” all at once.

A Scarred Legacy

And then came the photograph. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, among 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 colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, drained of life among the rubble and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but surviving.

I looked at 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 had significance”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else disappears. It is a persistent, stubborn rejection to vanish.