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

Among the debris of a collapsed apartment block, a particular image remained with me: a book I had translated from the English language to Farsi, lying partly concealed in dirt and soot. Its cover was shredded and stained, its pages curled and burned, but it was still legible. Still communicating.

A Metropolis During Bombardment

Two days prior, projectiles started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, violent detonations. The web was totally cut off. I was in my flat, rendering a text about what it means to carry words across tongues, and the principles and worries of inhabiting a different perspective. As structures fell, I sat revising a text that contended, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything ceased. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to go to print was stuck when the printing house shut down. Bookstores shut one by one. One night, when the booms were too nearby, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the library in my apartment, holding reference books, hard-to-find editions I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That library was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Separation and Loss

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous towns – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a photo: in the faraway, a industrial site was ablaze, thick smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods passed over the city like a storm: sudden fear, apprehension, moral outrage at the wrong, then numbness. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick look-ups and materials that the work demands.

Outside, concussive forces blew windows from their casings; at a relative's house, every pane was broken, the furniture lay ruined, objects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, painting at an easel, refusing to let silence and dust have the final say.

Translating Grief

A image circulated digitally of a 23-year-old artist who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went spread rapidly next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman hurrying between alleyways, shouting a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some deep-seated memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: turning destruction into picture, demise into poetry, grief into longing.

The Craft as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still amidst devastation, I found myself rendering 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 deep meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted working until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all desired – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than a skill: it was an act of resistance, of remaining, of enduring.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his prison cell, asking for more resources, insisting that linguistic work become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, goal, practice, support, and symbol” all at once.

An Enduring Legacy

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

I stared at 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 fire, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, stubborn refusal to be silenced.