Within those Devastated Remains of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Book I’d Translated

In the debris of a fallen apartment block, a particular sight lingered with me: a volume I had converted from English to Persian, resting half-buried in dirt and soot. Its jacket was torn and smudged, its leaves bent and burned, but it was still legible. Still speaking.

An Urban Center During Assault

Two days before, projectiles started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, forceful blasts. The internet was completely cut off. I was in my apartment, working on a book about what it means to move language across languages, and the ethics and anxieties of inhabiting a different perspective. As buildings fell, I sat editing a text that contended, in its understated way, for the endurance of meaning.

Everything ceased. A project my publishing house had been about to go to print was stuck when the printer shut down. Shops locked their doors one by one. One night, when the explosions were too nearby, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the library in my apartment, holding reference books, valuable books I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Dispersal and Loss

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous locations – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a photo: in the distance, a factory was on fire, dark smoke spiraling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to follow them.

During those days, feelings moved through the city like a front: sudden terror, apprehension, indignation at the unfairness, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and sources that the craft demands.

Outside, blast waves ripped windows from their frames; at a relative's house, every pane was broken, the furniture lay ruined, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, painting at an easel, declining to let quiet and dirt have the last word.

Translating Sorrow

A picture was shared on social media of a young writer who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her poem went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman dashing between passages, calling a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some deep-seated remembrance. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: changing destruction into image, demise into poetry, grief into search.

Translation as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself translating a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will recover 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 persisted working until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all yearned for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth pursuing.

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

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

A Scarred Voice

And then came the picture. I noticed it on a news site and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, scarred but intact, my name printed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been black and white, devoid of life among the debris and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but surviving.

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 full weight of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, 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 persist when everything else disappears. It is a persistent, unyielding refusal to vanish.