Among the Devastated Remains of an Apartment Block, I Found a Book I Had Translated

Among the rubble of a collapsed structure, a particular image lingered with me: a volume I had rendered from English to Persian, lying half-buried in dust and ash. Its front was ripped and dirtied, its leaves curled and burned, but it was still readable. Still uttering words.

A City Amid Attack

Two days prior, rockets started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, forceful explosions. The web was entirely disconnected. I was in my residence, translating a text about what it means to move language across tongues, and the ethics and worries of taking on another’s narrative. As structures fell, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publisher had been about to send to press was stuck when the printing house closed. Retailers closed one by one. One night, when the booms were too close, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the bookshelves in my apartment, holding reference books, valuable books I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Separation and Grief

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous towns – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a image: in the distance, a industrial site was burning, black smoke curling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to pursue them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like weather: sudden fear, unease, indignation at the injustice, then detachment. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate queries and materials that translation demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their sashes; at a family member's house, every pane was broken, the furniture lay damaged, objects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an easel, choosing not to let silence and debris have the last word.

Transforming Pain

A photograph spread digitally of a 23-year-old artist who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her poem went viral alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an older woman dashing between passages, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

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

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by ruin, I found myself translating a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted producing until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all longed for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond literary craft: it was an act of perseverance, of holding one's ground, of persisting.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his confinement, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that language study become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, hope, discipline, foundation, and symbol” all at once.

A Marked 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 renditions, marked but intact, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, drained of life among the rubble and debris. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but persisting.

I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the true gravity 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 haul stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else falls away. It is a persistent, unyielding declination to be silenced.