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

Among the rubble of a collapsed building, a single image remained with me: a book I had translated from English to Farsi, resting partially covered in dust and soot. Its cover was torn and stained, its sheets curled and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still uttering words.

An Urban Center Amid Attack

Two days earlier, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, violent blasts. The digital network was entirely cut off. I was in my apartment, rendering a work about what it means to transport text across cultures, and the morals and concerns of taking on another’s perspective. As structures collapsed, I sat editing a text that suggested, in its quiet way, for the endurance of meaning.

Everything ceased. A project my publishing house had been about to send to press was halted when the printer closed. Shops closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop worrying about the bookshelves in my apartment, holding reference books, valuable volumes I had spent years accumulating 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 more secure areas – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a picture: in the background, a plant was on fire, thick smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, feelings swept through the city like a storm: instant dread, apprehension, righteous anger at the injustice, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and references that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every pane was shattered, the belongings lay damaged, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, painting at an stand, declining to let quiet and dust have the last word.

Translating Sorrow

A photograph circulated on social media of a 23-year-old writer who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her poem went viral alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an elderly woman running between passages, shouting a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some repressed recollection. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: changing ruin into image, death into poetry, sorrow into longing.

Translation as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of devastation, I found myself rendering a story for young readers 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 lost his sight yet persisted creating until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all desired – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than literary craft: it was an act of resistance, of holding one's ground, of enduring.

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

A Scarred Voice

And then came the picture. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, damaged but intact, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, drained of life among the rubble and ruins. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but enduring.

I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a political act”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, stubborn refusal to disappear.