Among those Ruined Debris of an Apartment Block, I Found a Book I Had Rendered

Among the wreckage of a fallen apartment block, a single sight lingered with me: a volume I had converted from the English language to Farsi, lying half-buried in dust and soot. Its cover was shredded and stained, its sheets curled and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still uttering words.

An Urban Center Amid Attack

Two days prior, rockets started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, powerful blasts. The internet was entirely severed. I was in my flat, translating a book about what it means to move words across languages, and the principles and worries of taking on a different narrative. As structures came down, I sat revising a text that argued, in its understated way, for the persistence of meaning.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publisher had been about to go to print was halted when the printer shut down. Retailers locked their doors one by one. One night, when the blasts were too nearby, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the library in my apartment, filled with dictionaries, rare books I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That library was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Separation and Loss

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous towns – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a image: in the distance, a factory was on fire, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to chase them.

During those days, feelings moved through the city like a storm: instant terror, unease, moral outrage at the unfairness, then numbness. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and sources that the work demands.

Outside, blast waves tore windows from their casings; at a family member's house, every window was broken, the belongings lay damaged, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, creating at an stand, refusing to let stillness and dirt have the ultimate victory.

Translating Sorrow

A photograph spread digitally of a young poet who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her verse went viral alongside her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an older woman dashing between passages, yelling a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some buried recollection. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: turning devastation into image, demise into lines, grief into longing.

The Craft as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst devastation, I found myself working on a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet persisted creating until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all yearned for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than a skill: it was an act of resistance, of remaining, of holding on.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his prison cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that translation become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, goal, discipline, anchor, and symbol” all at once.

A Marked Legacy

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

I stared at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a political act”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else crumbles. It is a subtle, unyielding declination to disappear.