Within the Ruined Debris of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Book I’d Rendered

Among the debris of a collapsed apartment block, a solitary vision lingered with me: a volume I had translated from the English language to Farsi, resting partially covered in dirt and soot. Its front was shredded and dirtied, its pages bent and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating.

An Urban Center Under Attack

Two days prior, projectiles began striking the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, forceful explosions. The digital network was entirely severed. I was in my flat, working on a book about what it means to transport words across cultures, and the ethics and concerns of taking on another’s narrative. As structures collapsed, I sat polishing a text that argued, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of significance.

Everything halted. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to publish was halted when the printer ceased operations. Retailers closed one by one. One night, when the booms were too nearby, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the bookshelves in my apartment, stocked with lexicons, hard-to-find editions I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Dispersal and Grief

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous locations – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a picture: in the background, a industrial site was burning, thick smoke spiraling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to pursue them.

During those days, emotions passed over the city like a storm: swift dread, apprehension, righteous anger at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the emotional toll, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate searches and sources that the work demands.

Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their sashes; at a relative's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the possessions lay broken, objects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an easel, declining to let silence and dust have the last word.

Converting Sorrow

A picture circulated on social media of a 23-year-old artist who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her verse went viral with her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an older woman dashing between alleys, calling a name. People said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some deep-seated remembrance. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: turning ruin into image, death into lines, grief into search.

The Craft 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 get better only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted creating until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth striving for.

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

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his prison cell, asking for more resources, insisting that linguistic work become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, hope, rigor, anchor, and analogy” all at once.

An Enduring Legacy

And then came the picture. I spotted it on a website and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, scarred but surviving, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, devoid of life among the rubble and debris. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but surviving.

I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a political act”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under attack, 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 disappears. It is a persistent, determined declination to vanish.