Within those Devastated Debris of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Book I Had Translated

Among the wreckage of a destroyed structure, a single image remained with me: a tome I had rendered from English to Persian, sitting partially covered in dust and soot. Its jacket was shredded and stained, its sheets bent and singed, but it was still readable. Still communicating.

A City During Bombardment

Two days earlier, rockets commenced attacking the city. There were no sirens, just unexpected, forceful explosions. The web was totally cut off. I was in my flat, working on a book about what it means to carry text across tongues, and the principles and anxieties of taking on someone else's voice. As edifices fell, I sat editing a text that contended, in its understated way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything halted. A manuscript my publisher had been about to send to press was stuck when the facility closed. Shops closed one by one. One night, when the booms were too close, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the library in my apartment, stocked with lexicons, rare editions I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Distance and Loss

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous locations – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter went 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 spiraling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, feelings moved through the city like a storm: swift dread, apprehension, moral outrage at the wrong, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick look-ups and materials that translation demands.

Outside, blast waves blew windows from their sashes; at a family member's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the possessions lay damaged, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, painting at an stand, declining to let quiet and dirt have the ultimate victory.

Translating Sorrow

A picture was shared on social media of a young writer who was died when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an elderly woman running between passages, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some deep-seated recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: turning devastation into art, death into poetry, mourning into longing.

Translation as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still amidst devastation, I found myself rendering a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will heal 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 persisted creating until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all desired – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than literary craft: it was an act of defiance, of remaining, of persisting.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his prison cell, asking for more resources, insisting that translation become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, goal, rigor, support, and symbol” all at once.

A Marked Legacy

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

I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the full weight of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice had significance”. 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 quiet, stubborn refusal to vanish.