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

Among the wreckage of a collapsed building, a particular vision stayed with me: a volume I had rendered from the English language to Farsi, lying half-buried in dust and soot. Its jacket was ripped and smudged, its sheets bent and scorched, but it was still legible. Still speaking.

A City During Attack

Two days prior, rockets began striking the city. There were no sirens, just sudden, powerful blasts. The internet was totally severed. I was in my residence, translating a work about what it means to move words across languages, and the ethics and concerns of inhabiting another’s voice. As buildings came down, I sat editing a text that suggested, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publisher had been about to go to print was stranded when the printing house shut down. Retailers closed one by one. One night, when the explosions were too close, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the library in my apartment, holding reference books, valuable volumes I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my life's work, 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 safer towns – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a picture: in the distance, a industrial site was ablaze, black smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and threat seemed to chase them.

During those days, moods passed over the city like a storm: instant terror, anxiety, moral outrage at the injustice, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and materials that translation demands.

Outside, shockwaves ripped windows from their casings; at a cousin'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 easel, refusing to let silence and dust have the ultimate victory.

Transforming Pain

A picture spread online of a young artist who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an elderly woman running between alleys, shouting a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some deep-seated remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: changing destruction into image, death into verse, sorrow into search.

The Work as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of ruin, I found myself working on a fable about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can possess 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 striving 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 greater than a skill: it was an act of resistance, of staying put, of holding on.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his prison cell, asking for more resources, insisting that translation become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, goal, rigor, anchor, and analogy” all at once.

An Enduring Legacy

And then came the image. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, marked but intact, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, 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 visible – scarred, but persisting.

I gazed upon 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 had significance”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, determined declination to disappear.