Within the Devastated Remains of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Book I Had Translated

Within the wreckage of a destroyed building, a particular sight lingered with me: a tome I had translated from the English language to Farsi, resting partly concealed in dust and soot. Its jacket was shredded and stained, its leaves curled and scorched, but it was still decipherable. Still uttering words.

A City Amid Attack

Two days prior, projectiles started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, powerful blasts. The digital network was completely disconnected. I was in my apartment, translating a text about what it means to transport words across cultures, and the morals and worries of taking on another’s narrative. As buildings came down, I sat revising a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the persistence of meaning.

Everything stopped. A book my publishing house had been about to publish was stuck when the printer ceased operations. Retailers shut one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the bookshelves in my apartment, stocked with reference books, hard-to-find editions I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That library was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Separation and Loss

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be safer areas – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a picture: in the faraway, a industrial site was on fire, black smoke coiling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly somewhere else, and danger seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like a storm: swift fear, apprehension, moral outrage at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the emotional toll, the shelling eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and sources that the craft demands.

Outside, blast waves blew windows from their sashes; at a relative's house, every sheet of glass was destroyed, the possessions lay broken, objects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, working at an easel, declining to let quiet and debris have the final say.

Converting Grief

A image was shared digitally of a young artist who was died when missiles struck a building. Her poem went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman hurrying between alleyways, yelling a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some deep-seated recollection. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: transforming ruin into picture, death into lines, mourning into quest.

The Craft as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself translating 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 experienced the loss of his sight yet continued producing until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all yearned for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than literary craft: it was an act of resistance, of remaining, of enduring.

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

A Marked Legacy

And then came the image. I noticed it on a website and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, marked but surviving, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, drained of life among the concrete and debris. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but persisting.

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 complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else falls away. It is a subtle, determined declination to be silenced.