Within the Ruined Debris of an Apartment Block, I Found a Book I Had Rendered

In the debris of a collapsed apartment block, a solitary vision lingered with me: a volume I had translated from the English language to Persian, sitting half-buried in dust and soot. Its front was shredded and stained, its pages bent and singed, but it was still readable. Still speaking.

A City During Assault

Two days earlier, rockets commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, powerful blasts. The digital network was entirely disconnected. I was in my apartment, translating a text about what it means to transport text across tongues, and the principles and worries of taking on a different narrative. As edifices fell, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the endurance of meaning.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publisher had been about to publish was halted when the printing house shut down. Retailers shut one by one. One night, when the blasts were too nearby, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop thinking about the library in my apartment, filled with dictionaries, rare volumes I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Distance and Devastation

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure towns – 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 faraway, a plant was burning, black smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like a storm: swift fear, apprehension, moral outrage at the wrong, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and sources that the craft demands.

Outside, blast waves blew windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every pane was shattered, the belongings lay ruined, personal effects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an stand, refusing to let stillness and debris have the final say.

Converting Sorrow

A image was shared online of a young writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went was widely shared with her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an elderly woman running between alleys, yelling a name. People said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some buried remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: changing devastation into art, loss into poetry, mourning into quest.

The Work as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst destruction, I found myself rendering a fable about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet kept creating until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unreachable. 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 defiance, of holding one's ground, of holding on.

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

A Scarred Legacy

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 renditions, scarred but intact, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, devoid of life among the concrete and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but enduring.

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 fire, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else falls away. It is a persistent, determined refusal to disappear.