Amid those Ruined Remains of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Book I Had Translated

Among the debris of a collapsed apartment block, a single image stayed with me: a book I had translated from the English language to Farsi, sitting half-buried in dust and soot. Its jacket was shredded and stained, its sheets bent and singed, but it was still readable. Still communicating.

A City Amid Assault

Two days prior, rockets commenced attacking the city. There were no sirens, just unexpected, forceful explosions. The digital network was entirely disconnected. I was in my residence, rendering a text about what it means to transport words across languages, and the ethics and concerns of occupying someone else's voice. As buildings fell, I sat revising a text that suggested, in its quiet way, for the persistence of purpose.

Everything ceased. A manuscript my publisher had been about to publish was stuck when the facility ceased operations. Shops closed one by one. One night, when the explosions were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop worrying about the library in my apartment, holding dictionaries, rare books I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Separation and Grief

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous areas – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a photo: in the distance, a factory was on fire, black smoke curling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods swept through the city like a front: instant terror, anxiety, indignation at the unfairness, then numbness. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate queries and references that translation demands.

Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every window was destroyed, the furniture lay ruined, household items scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, painting at an stand, refusing to let stillness and dust have the final say.

Converting Pain

A picture spread on social media of a young writer who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her writing went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman dashing between passages, shouting a name. People said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some deep-seated recollection. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

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

The Work as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of devastation, 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 working until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all yearned for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than literary craft: it was an act of defiance, of staying put, of persisting.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that language study become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, aspiration, rigor, foundation, and metaphor” all at once.

A Scarred Work

And then came the photograph. I spotted it on a website 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 colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, stripped of life among the debris and debris. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but persisting.

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 full weight of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else falls away. It is a subtle, unyielding declination to disappear.