Amid the Ruined Remains of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Volume I’d Translated

Within the wreckage of a fallen building, a solitary vision remained with me: a book I had converted from the English language to Farsi, resting half-buried in dust and soot. Its jacket was torn and smudged, its sheets bent and singed, but it was still readable. Still communicating.

A City Under Assault

Two days earlier, missiles commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just sudden, violent detonations. The web was completely severed. I was in my flat, working on a text about what it means to move language across cultures, and the ethics and concerns of occupying another’s narrative. As edifices fell, I sat revising a text that argued, in its understated way, for the endurance of meaning.

Everything stopped. A book my publisher had been about to send to press was stuck when the printer shut down. Bookstores closed one by one. One night, when the booms were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop worrying about the bookshelves in my apartment, filled with lexicons, rare volumes I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Distance and Loss

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous locations – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a industrial site was ablaze, thick smoke spiraling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly elsewhere, and danger seemed to pursue them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like weather: swift terror, anxiety, righteous anger at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the emotional toll, the attack eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and sources that translation demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every pane was broken, the furniture lay ruined, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, creating at an easel, choosing not to let stillness and debris have the last word.

Translating Sorrow

A picture was shared online of a young writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared next to her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an elderly woman running between alleys, calling a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: transforming ruin into art, demise into lines, grief into search.

The Work as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of destruction, I found myself rendering a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep 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 reaching for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than literary craft: it was an act of defiance, 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 leader in his confinement, asking for more books, insisting that language study become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, goal, rigor, support, and analogy” all at once.

A Scarred Legacy

And then came the picture. I noticed it on a platform and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, damaged but surviving, 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 debris 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 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 bombardment, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a subtle, determined rejection to vanish.