Among the Ruined Debris of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Book I Had Rendered

In the debris of a destroyed building, a single image remained with me: a tome I had rendered from English to Farsi, resting partially covered in dirt and soot. Its cover was shredded and smudged, its leaves bent and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still uttering words.

A City During Attack

Two days prior, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, forceful explosions. The web was totally severed. I was in my apartment, rendering a text about what it means to carry words across tongues, and the ethics and worries of taking on another’s narrative. As edifices came down, I sat revising a text that contended, in its understated way, for the endurance of meaning.

Everything stopped. A book my publishing house had been about to send to press was stranded when the printing house shut down. Retailers 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 thinking about the library in my apartment, stocked with reference books, hard-to-find books I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That library was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Dispersal and Loss

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be safer areas – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a photo: in the background, a plant was on fire, dark smoke spiraling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and danger seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods swept through the city like a storm: instant dread, apprehension, moral outrage at the unfairness, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick look-ups and sources that translation demands.

Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their frames; at a relative's house, every pane was shattered, the possessions lay ruined, objects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, creating at an easel, declining to let silence and debris have the final say.

Translating Grief

A photograph spread online of a young artist who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her writing went was widely shared next to her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an elderly woman running between alleys, yelling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a conflict 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 translating, in our own way: turning devastation into art, loss into lines, sorrow into longing.

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself rendering a fable about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet continued creating 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 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 holding one's ground, of enduring.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his prison cell, asking for more books, insisting that language study become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, aspiration, rigor, support, and analogy” all at once.

A Marked Work

And then came the image. I spotted it on a platform and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, marked 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 debris and ruins. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but persisting.

I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a act with consequences”, but I had never felt the true gravity 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 haul stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, stubborn refusal to disappear.