Amid the Ruined Debris of an Apartment Block, I Found a Book I’d Rendered

In the rubble of a collapsed structure, a single vision remained with me: a book I had translated from English to Farsi, sitting half-buried in dirt and ash. Its cover was torn and smudged, its sheets bent and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still uttering words.

An Urban Center During Attack

Two days prior, missiles commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, violent explosions. The digital network was completely severed. I was in my flat, working on a text about what it means to move text across tongues, and the ethics and concerns of inhabiting a different narrative. As buildings collapsed, I sat polishing a text that contended, in its quiet way, for the persistence of purpose.

Everything halted. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to go to print was stuck when the facility ceased operations. Bookstores closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the bookshelves in my apartment, filled with lexicons, hard-to-find volumes I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That library was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Distance and Loss

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous locations – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a photo: in the background, a factory was ablaze, thick smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly somewhere else, and danger seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like a storm: instant fear, unease, indignation at the wrong, then numbness. 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 sources that the work demands.

Outside, shockwaves ripped windows from their sashes; at a family member's house, every pane was broken, the possessions lay ruined, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, working at an stand, declining to let quiet and dust have the last word.

Converting Grief

A picture was shared on social media of a young poet who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an elderly woman dashing between alleyways, calling a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some repressed memory. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: turning destruction into picture, death into verse, mourning into longing.

Translation as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still amidst devastation, I found myself working on a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant 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 aiming at the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all longed for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than literary craft: it was an act of resistance, of holding one's ground, of enduring.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his confinement, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that translation become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, goal, discipline, foundation, and metaphor” all at once.

A Marked Voice

And then came the photograph. I noticed it on a news site and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, damaged but intact, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, drained of life among the debris and ruins. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but persisting.

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 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 falls away. It is a subtle, determined rejection to disappear.