Among those Ruined Remains of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Volume I Had Translated

In the wreckage of a destroyed apartment block, a particular image remained with me: a book I had rendered from English to Farsi, sitting partly concealed in dust and soot. Its cover was shredded and stained, its leaves bent and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating.

An Urban Center Amid Bombardment

Two days prior, projectiles started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, powerful explosions. The web was completely disconnected. I was in my residence, translating a book about what it means to move language across languages, and the morals and anxieties of inhabiting another’s narrative. As buildings came down, I sat editing a text that contended, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of significance.

Everything halted. A project my publisher had been about to send to press was stuck when the printer shut down. Retailers closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too nearby, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, filled with reference books, rare books I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Separation and Grief

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure locations – 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 picture: in the faraway, a industrial site was burning, thick smoke spiraling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, emotions passed over the city like a storm: swift fear, apprehension, moral outrage at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and references that the work demands.

Outside, blast waves tore windows from their sashes; at a family member's house, every sheet of glass was destroyed, the possessions lay ruined, personal effects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an easel, refusing to let stillness and debris have the final say.

Converting Sorrow

A image was shared digitally of a 23-year-old writer who was died when missiles struck a building. Her poem went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman hurrying between alleys, shouting a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some buried recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: transforming devastation into image, demise into verse, sorrow into quest.

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst destruction, I found myself translating a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet kept producing until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all desired – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than literary craft: it was an act of perseverance, of remaining, of holding on.

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 books, insisting that linguistic work become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, goal, rigor, support, and analogy” all at once.

A Marked Work

And then came the image. I spotted it on a website and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, damaged but intact, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, devoid of life among the rubble 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 looked 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 had significance”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, determined rejection to be silenced.