Among those Ruined Debris of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Volume I Had Translated

In the debris of a collapsed building, a particular image stayed with me: a book I had converted from English to Farsi, lying half-buried in dust and soot. Its front was ripped and stained, its sheets bent and singed, but it was still legible. Still communicating.

A City During Assault

Two days earlier, missiles started hitting the city. There were no sirens, just abrupt, powerful detonations. The digital network was totally disconnected. I was in my flat, translating a work about what it means to move language across tongues, and the morals and anxieties of taking on a different voice. As edifices collapsed, I sat editing a text that argued, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything ceased. A book my publishing house had been about to send to press was stuck when the printing house ceased operations. Shops shut one by one. One night, when the blasts were too nearby, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the bookshelves in my apartment, holding reference books, hard-to-find editions I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Dispersal and Devastation

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous towns – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a picture: in the background, a industrial site was on fire, thick smoke coiling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like a storm: swift terror, apprehension, indignation at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick queries and sources that the craft demands.

Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the furniture lay broken, objects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, painting at an easel, choosing not to let stillness and debris have the final say.

Converting Pain

A picture spread on social media of a 23-year-old artist who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an older woman hurrying between alleys, yelling a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some repressed remembrance. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: turning devastation into image, death into lines, sorrow into search.

The Craft as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself working on a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet kept working until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all yearned for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond literary craft: it was an act of resistance, of staying put, of enduring.

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

A Marked Work

And then came the picture. I noticed it on a news site and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, scarred but whole, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, stripped 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 visible – scarred, but enduring.

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 was important”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else disappears. It is a persistent, unyielding refusal to vanish.