Amid those Ruined Debris of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Book I’d Rendered

In the rubble of a fallen building, a single vision lingered with me: a book I had translated from English to Farsi, resting partly concealed in dirt and ash. Its front was torn and smudged, its pages curled and burned, but it was still legible. Still uttering words.

A Metropolis Under Attack

Two days prior, rockets started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, violent blasts. The internet was totally disconnected. I was in my residence, rendering a work about what it means to carry words across languages, and the morals and worries of occupying a different narrative. As buildings fell, I sat revising a text that contended, in its understated way, for the endurance of purpose.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publisher had been about to send to press was stranded when the printer closed. Shops shut one by one. One night, when the booms were too nearby, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the bookshelves in my apartment, holding lexicons, hard-to-find books I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That library was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive 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 struck. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a photo: in the distance, a factory was on fire, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly somewhere else, and threat seemed to chase them.

During those days, moods swept through the city like a front: swift dread, apprehension, moral outrage at the wrong, then detachment. Beyond the emotional toll, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick searches and references that the work demands.

Outside, concussive forces ripped windows from their casings; at a family member's house, every window was destroyed, the possessions lay damaged, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an easel, refusing to let silence and dust have the last word.

Converting Sorrow

A picture spread on social media of a 23-year-old poet who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared next to her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an elderly woman running between alleys, yelling a name. People said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some deep-seated recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: turning devastation into picture, death into verse, sorrow into search.

The Work as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by ruin, 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 deep meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet kept working until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all longed for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than an art form: it was an act of resistance, of staying put, of enduring.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his confinement, asking for more books, insisting that linguistic work become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, goal, practice, anchor, and symbol” all at once.

A Marked Voice

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

I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a act with consequences”, 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 erased. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else crumbles. It is a subtle, unyielding declination to disappear.