Amid the Devastated Remains of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Book I’d Rendered

Within the debris of a destroyed apartment block, a single sight lingered with me: a volume I had converted from the English language to Persian, sitting partly concealed in dust and ash. Its jacket was torn and dirtied, its pages curled and burned, but it was still legible. Still uttering words.

A City During Bombardment

Two days earlier, rockets started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, powerful blasts. The web was totally severed. I was in my apartment, translating a text about what it means to carry language across tongues, and the ethics and anxieties of taking on someone else's perspective. As buildings fell, I sat editing a text that argued, in its subtle way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything stopped. A book my publisher had been about to go to print was stranded when the facility shut down. Retailers closed one by one. One night, when the booms were too nearby, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop worrying about the bookshelves in my apartment, stocked with reference books, rare volumes I had spent years accumulating 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 Grief

My spouse 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 pulling out, she sent me a photo: in the background, a factory was ablaze, thick smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to follow them.

During those days, feelings moved through the city like a front: swift fear, unease, righteous anger at the wrong, then apathy. Beyond the personal impact, the attack eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant look-ups and materials that the work demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their frames; at a relative's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the furniture lay ruined, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, creating at an easel, refusing to let silence and dirt have the final say.

Transforming Pain

A image spread digitally of a young artist who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her poem went was widely shared next to her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an older woman hurrying between alleyways, shouting a name. People said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some buried remembrance. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: changing destruction into picture, demise into lines, mourning into longing.

The Craft as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of destruction, I found myself rendering a fable about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet kept 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 impossible, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than an art form: it was an act of resistance, of staying put, of holding on.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his prison cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that translation become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, aspiration, practice, foundation, and analogy” all at once.

A Scarred Legacy

And then came the photograph. I saw it on a platform and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, scarred 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 debris and debris. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – 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 true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else disappears. It is a persistent, unyielding refusal to be silenced.