Among the Devastated Remains of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Volume I Had Translated

Among the debris of a fallen apartment block, a single sight remained with me: a tome I had translated from English to Persian, sitting partially covered in dust and ash. Its jacket was shredded and stained, its leaves curled and burned, but it was still legible. Still speaking.

A City During Assault

Two days prior, rockets started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just sudden, violent blasts. The internet was totally cut off. I was in my residence, rendering a book about what it means to transport words across languages, and the principles and concerns of taking on another’s narrative. As buildings fell, I sat revising a text that contended, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of significance.

Everything ceased. A manuscript my publisher had been about to publish was halted when the facility closed. Bookstores locked their doors one by one. One night, when the explosions were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the bookshelves in my apartment, filled with dictionaries, hard-to-find editions I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That library was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Distance and Grief

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure locations – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a photo: in the faraway, a industrial site was ablaze, black smoke curling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to pursue them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like a storm: swift terror, unease, moral outrage at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate searches and materials that the work demands.

Outside, shockwaves ripped windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the possessions lay damaged, objects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, painting at an stand, refusing to let quiet and debris have the last word.

Transforming Sorrow

A photograph circulated on social media of a young artist who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her poem went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman running between alleys, calling a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some buried memory. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: transforming ruin into image, demise into poetry, mourning into search.

The Work as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of devastation, I found myself translating 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 profound 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 impossible. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all yearned for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than an art form: it was an act of perseverance, of holding one's ground, of enduring.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his prison cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that linguistic work become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, aspiration, discipline, anchor, and metaphor” all at once.

A Scarred Voice

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

I stared at 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 forgotten. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, unyielding refusal to vanish.