Amid the Devastated Remains of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Book I Had Translated

Among the wreckage of a fallen apartment block, a particular vision remained with me: a volume I had rendered from the English language to Persian, sitting half-buried in dirt and ash. Its jacket was ripped and stained, its leaves bent and scorched, but it was still legible. Still communicating.

A City Under Assault

Two days earlier, missiles began striking the city. There were no warnings, just sudden, powerful detonations. The internet was completely disconnected. I was in my flat, translating a text about what it means to move text across languages, and the ethics and anxieties of taking on another’s narrative. As edifices collapsed, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its subtle way, for the persistence of meaning.

Everything ceased. A project my publishing house had been about to send to press was halted when the printer shut down. Bookstores shut one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop thinking about the library in my apartment, filled with lexicons, valuable books I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That library was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Dispersal and Grief

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous locations – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a factory was ablaze, black smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and danger seemed to chase them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like a front: swift fear, unease, righteous anger at the unfairness, then numbness. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, blast waves ripped windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the possessions lay ruined, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, painting at an stand, refusing to let silence and debris have the ultimate victory.

Translating Pain

A image was shared online of a young artist who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman dashing between alleys, yelling a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried remembrance. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: changing devastation into picture, loss into lines, mourning into longing.

The Work as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself working on a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound 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 aiming at the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all longed for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond a skill: it was an act of defiance, of holding one's ground, of holding on.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher 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 reality, hope, discipline, anchor, and analogy” all at once.

A Marked Voice

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 translations, marked but intact, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been black and white, drained of life among the concrete and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but surviving.

I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a act with consequences”, but I had never felt the full weight of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, determined declination to be silenced.