Amid the Ruined Remains of an Apartment Block, I Found a Volume I Had Translated

Within the wreckage of a fallen apartment block, a single sight lingered with me: a book I had rendered from the English language to Persian, resting half-buried in dust and ash. Its jacket was ripped and stained, its sheets bent and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking.

A Metropolis Under Attack

Two days before, rockets began striking the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, violent explosions. The digital network was totally severed. I was in my flat, rendering a text about what it means to carry text across languages, and the ethics and anxieties of occupying another’s perspective. As edifices fell, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything stopped. A project my publisher had been about to publish was stuck when the printing house shut down. Bookstores closed one by one. One night, when the explosions were too close, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop thinking about the shelves in my apartment, filled with lexicons, valuable books I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Distance and Devastation

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous areas – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a image: in the background, a plant was burning, black smoke curling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and danger seemed to chase them.

During those days, emotions moved through the city like weather: instant terror, unease, righteous anger at the wrong, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the bombardment destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant look-ups and materials that the work demands.

Outside, shockwaves ripped windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every pane was shattered, the furniture lay ruined, objects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an easel, choosing not to let quiet and dirt have the last word.

Transforming Grief

A picture spread digitally of a 23-year-old artist who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman running between alleys, calling a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some repressed recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: transforming destruction into picture, demise into verse, sorrow into quest.

Translation as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself working on a fable about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet kept creating until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility 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 holding on.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his cell, asking for more books, insisting that translation become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, aspiration, rigor, support, and analogy” all at once.

A Scarred Voice

And then came the photograph. I spotted it on a platform and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, damaged but surviving, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been black and white, devoid of life among the rubble and ruins. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but surviving.

I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else falls away. It is a subtle, unyielding declination to disappear.