Within those Devastated Debris of an Apartment Block, I Found a Book I’d Rendered

Among the wreckage of a collapsed apartment block, a solitary vision lingered with me: a volume I had converted from the English language to Farsi, sitting half-buried in dust and soot. Its cover was shredded and smudged, its pages bent and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still uttering words.

An Urban Center Amid Attack

Two days earlier, missiles commenced attacking the city. There were no sirens, just sudden, violent explosions. The digital network was completely severed. I was in my apartment, rendering a work about what it means to move text across cultures, and the principles and anxieties of taking on someone else's narrative. As structures collapsed, I sat revising a text that contended, in its understated way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything halted. A project my publisher had been about to go to print was stuck when the printing house ceased operations. Retailers shut one by one. One night, when the explosions were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the shelves in my apartment, stocked with lexicons, 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 make it through the night.

Distance and Devastation

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous locations – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a factory was on fire, thick smoke coiling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly somewhere else, and threat seemed to chase them.

During those days, moods passed over the city like a front: sudden dread, unease, indignation at the unfairness, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the bombardment destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick queries and materials that translation demands.

Outside, blast waves ripped windows from their casings; at a family member's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the furniture lay ruined, household items scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, painting at an stand, refusing to let quiet and dust have the ultimate victory.

Transforming Grief

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

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

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of devastation, I found myself translating a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet kept working until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all yearned for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than literary craft: it was an act of resistance, of staying put, of enduring.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his confinement, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that language study become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, goal, discipline, support, and metaphor” all at once.

An Enduring Voice

And then came the image. I noticed it on a platform and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, damaged but surviving, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, devoid of life among the rubble and ruins. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but surviving.

I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a act with consequences”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, stubborn refusal to disappear.