Amid the Devastated Remains of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Book I Had Rendered

Among the rubble of a destroyed building, a particular sight stayed with me: a tome I had converted from English to Persian, resting partially covered in dust and soot. Its front was torn and dirtied, its pages curled and singed, but it was still readable. Still uttering words.

An Urban Center Under Bombardment

Two days before, missiles commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, powerful explosions. The web was entirely disconnected. I was in my flat, working on a text about what it means to carry language across cultures, and the principles and anxieties of inhabiting a different narrative. As edifices came down, I sat revising a text that suggested, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of significance.

Everything ceased. A manuscript my publisher had been about to go to print was stranded when the printer shut down. Shops closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop worrying about the library in my apartment, filled with lexicons, hard-to-find books I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Distance and Devastation

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be safer towns – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a photo: in the distance, a plant was on fire, black smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like a front: instant dread, anxiety, righteous anger at the wrong, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate queries and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces blew windows from their frames; at a relative's house, every pane was destroyed, the furniture lay broken, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an stand, refusing to let silence and dirt have the final say.

Translating Grief

A image was shared on social media of a young writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her poem went was widely shared with her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an older woman hurrying between passages, yelling a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried recollection. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: turning devastation into art, death into poetry, sorrow into search.

Translation as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of devastation, I found myself translating a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound 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 striving for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all longed for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond an art form: it was an act of resistance, of remaining, of enduring.

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

A Scarred Legacy

And then came the photograph. I saw it on a news site and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, damaged but surviving, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, devoid of life among the rubble and debris. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, 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 statement”, but I had never felt the full weight 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 subtle, unyielding declination to be silenced.