Amid those Devastated Remains of an Apartment Block, I Found a Book I’d Translated

In the wreckage of a destroyed apartment block, a particular vision lingered with me: a book I had rendered from the English language to Farsi, resting half-buried in dirt and ash. Its cover was shredded and smudged, its pages bent and burned, but it was still readable. Still uttering words.

A City Amid Attack

Two days earlier, missiles started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, forceful explosions. The web was completely severed. I was in my flat, rendering a work about what it means to transport text across languages, and the ethics and concerns of taking on another’s voice. As edifices fell, I sat editing a text that contended, in its quiet way, for the endurance of meaning.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to go to print was halted when the facility shut down. Retailers closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the shelves in my apartment, holding dictionaries, rare editions I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Dispersal and Loss

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be safer towns – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a picture: in the faraway, a factory was on fire, thick smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and peril seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like a front: swift dread, unease, moral outrage at the unfairness, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the bombardment destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick queries and sources that the work demands.

Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their casings; at a relative's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the belongings lay damaged, objects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an easel, choosing not to let stillness and dust have the ultimate victory.

Converting Pain

A picture spread digitally of a 23-year-old poet who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral with her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an elderly woman dashing between alleys, yelling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some repressed remembrance. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: changing destruction into art, demise into verse, grief into search.

The Craft as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of destruction, I found myself translating a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet continued working until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the calm 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 resistance, of staying put, of persisting.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his cell, asking for more books, insisting that language study become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, aspiration, discipline, foundation, and symbol” all at once.

An Enduring Voice

And then came the image. I noticed it on a website and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, damaged but intact, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, drained 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 apparent – scarred, but enduring.

I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the complete significance 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 transport stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else crumbles. It is a subtle, stubborn refusal to be silenced.