Among those Ruined Debris of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Book I’d Translated

In the rubble of a destroyed apartment block, a particular image lingered with me: a volume I had converted from English to Farsi, resting partially covered in dust and ash. Its jacket was ripped and dirtied, its sheets bent and scorched, but it was still legible. Still communicating.

A Metropolis Amid Assault

Two days earlier, rockets began striking the city. There were no sirens, just sudden, forceful blasts. The web was entirely cut off. I was in my residence, working on a book about what it means to move language across tongues, and the ethics and anxieties of inhabiting someone else's voice. As structures collapsed, I sat revising a text that contended, in its subtle way, for the persistence of meaning.

Everything stopped. A project my publishing house had been about to publish was stuck when the facility ceased operations. Bookstores closed one by one. One night, when the explosions were too nearby, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, filled with lexicons, valuable volumes I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Dispersal and Devastation

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure locations – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a picture: in the background, a plant was ablaze, dark smoke coiling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly somewhere else, and danger seemed to pursue them.

During those days, feelings swept through the city like a front: swift terror, unease, righteous anger at the injustice, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick queries and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the furniture lay damaged, personal effects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an stand, choosing not to let quiet and dust have the last word.

Translating Grief

A image was shared digitally of a young writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her poem went spread rapidly next to her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an elderly woman running between alleys, calling a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some repressed memory. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: transforming ruin into image, loss into verse, sorrow into search.

The Work as Defiance

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 possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep 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 unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond a skill: it was an act of perseverance, of remaining, of persisting.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his prison cell, asking for more resources, insisting that linguistic work become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, hope, discipline, anchor, and analogy” all at once.

A Marked Work

And then came the picture. I noticed it on a platform and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, scarred but intact, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, stripped of life among the concrete and debris. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but enduring.

I stared at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, 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 erased. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else falls away. It is a persistent, determined rejection to vanish.