Amid those Devastated Remains of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Book I’d Rendered

Among the rubble of a destroyed apartment block, a particular vision stayed with me: a book I had translated from English to Persian, sitting partly concealed in dirt and ash. Its front was ripped and dirtied, its pages bent and burned, but it was still readable. Still communicating.

A Metropolis During Assault

Two days before, missiles started hitting the city. There were no sirens, just abrupt, powerful detonations. The internet was entirely severed. I was in my apartment, translating a work about what it means to move text across languages, and the ethics and worries of inhabiting someone else's perspective. As edifices collapsed, I sat polishing a text that argued, in its understated way, for the persistence of significance.

Everything halted. A book my publishing house had been about to publish was stranded when the printer ceased operations. Bookstores shut one by one. One night, when the explosions were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop worrying about the library in my apartment, filled with dictionaries, valuable volumes I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That library was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Separation and Devastation

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure areas – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a picture: in the distance, a industrial site was on fire, dark smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and danger seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods swept through the city like a front: instant dread, apprehension, indignation at the wrong, then apathy. Beyond the emotional toll, the shelling eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick queries and references that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces blew windows from their sashes; at a family member's house, every window was broken, the furniture lay damaged, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, painting at an easel, refusing to let silence and dirt have the last word.

Transforming Pain

A photograph circulated online of a young artist who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral with her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an older woman running between alleys, yelling a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some deep-seated memory. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: turning devastation into art, demise into verse, mourning into search.

Translation as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still amidst destruction, I found myself rendering a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will get better 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 creating until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all yearned for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than a skill: it was an act of defiance, of holding one's ground, of holding on.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his prison cell, asking for more books, insisting that linguistic work become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, goal, discipline, foundation, and metaphor” all at once.

A Marked Voice

And then came the image. I noticed it on a website and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, scarred but whole, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, drained of life among the rubble and debris. For most of my career, I had been invisible, 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 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 had significance”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else disappears. It is a subtle, stubborn declination to disappear.