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

Within the rubble of a fallen building, a particular image lingered with me: a volume I had translated from the English language to Persian, sitting half-buried in dirt and ash. Its front was ripped and smudged, its leaves bent and burned, but it was still readable. Still communicating.

A City Under Assault

Two days before, missiles commenced attacking the city. There were no sirens, just unexpected, forceful blasts. The digital network was entirely severed. I was in my apartment, rendering a work about what it means to transport words across tongues, and the morals and anxieties of taking on someone else's voice. As buildings collapsed, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the endurance of meaning.

Everything stopped. A project my publisher had been about to go to print was stuck when the printer closed. Bookstores shut one by one. One night, when the booms were too nearby, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the bookshelves in my apartment, filled with lexicons, rare volumes 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 Grief

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

During those days, moods swept through the city like a storm: swift fear, unease, moral outrage at the wrong, then detachment. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and materials that the work demands.

Outside, concussive forces ripped windows from their casings; at a family member's house, every window was broken, the belongings lay damaged, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, painting at an stand, choosing not to let silence and dirt have the last word.

Transforming Sorrow

A picture circulated digitally of a young poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly alongside her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an older woman hurrying between passages, yelling a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some repressed recollection. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: changing ruin into image, demise into poetry, grief into longing.

The Craft as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by ruin, I found myself working on a fable about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet persisted creating until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than an art form: it was an act of defiance, of staying put, of enduring.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his confinement, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that linguistic work become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, aspiration, rigor, support, and analogy” all at once.

An Enduring Work

And then came the photograph. I noticed it on a news site and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, damaged but whole, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, drained of life among the rubble and debris. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but surviving.

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 bombardment, 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 crumbles. It is a persistent, unyielding rejection to vanish.