Among those Devastated Remains of an Apartment Block, I Found a Book I Had Translated

In the debris of a fallen building, a single vision remained with me: a book I had rendered from the English language to Farsi, lying partly concealed in dirt and ash. Its front was shredded and smudged, its sheets curled and scorched, but it was still legible. Still uttering words.

A Metropolis Under Assault

Two days before, rockets commenced attacking the city. There were no sirens, just abrupt, violent blasts. The digital network was entirely disconnected. I was in my flat, translating a work about what it means to transport words across languages, and the morals and concerns of inhabiting someone else's voice. As buildings fell, I sat polishing a text that argued, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publisher had been about to publish was stuck when the facility ceased operations. Bookstores closed one by one. One night, when the booms were too nearby, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the library in my apartment, filled with dictionaries, valuable volumes I had spent years accumulating 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.

Dispersal and Loss

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous towns – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a picture: in the background, a plant was burning, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and peril seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods moved through the city like a storm: swift fear, anxiety, indignation at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate queries and materials that the work demands.

Outside, blast waves tore windows from their casings; at a family member's house, every window was destroyed, the furniture lay ruined, objects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, creating at an easel, declining to let quiet and debris have the ultimate victory.

Converting Pain

A image was shared online of a young poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her poem went viral alongside her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an elderly woman hurrying between alleys, shouting a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some deep-seated memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: transforming destruction into image, death into poetry, grief into quest.

The Craft as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of devastation, I found myself translating a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet continued producing until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all longed for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than a skill: it was an act of defiance, of staying put, of holding on.

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

An Enduring Voice

And then came the photograph. I saw it on a news site and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, scarred but intact, my name printed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been black and white, stripped 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 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 complete significance 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 transport stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else crumbles. It is a subtle, stubborn rejection to be silenced.