Among the Devastated Remains of an Apartment Block, I Found a Volume I’d Translated

In the rubble of a collapsed apartment block, a particular vision remained with me: a book I had rendered from the English language to Persian, lying partly concealed in dust and ash. Its cover was torn and smudged, its sheets bent and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still uttering words.

A City During Assault

Two days before, rockets commenced attacking the city. There were no sirens, just abrupt, forceful blasts. The web was totally severed. I was in my apartment, rendering a text about what it means to move words across tongues, and the principles and concerns of inhabiting another’s narrative. As edifices fell, I sat editing a text that suggested, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything halted. A project my publisher had been about to send to press was stuck when the facility closed. Retailers closed one by one. One night, when the explosions were too close, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop thinking about the library in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, valuable volumes I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Dispersal and Devastation

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous locations – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a image: in the background, a factory was ablaze, thick smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like weather: sudden fear, apprehension, indignation at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and references that translation demands.

Outside, blast waves tore windows from their sashes; at a family member's house, every sheet of glass was destroyed, the belongings lay broken, personal effects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, creating at an easel, refusing to let stillness and dirt have the last word.

Converting Grief

A picture circulated digitally of a young poet who was died when missiles struck a building. Her poem went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an older woman running between alleys, shouting a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some deep-seated remembrance. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: turning destruction into art, loss into poetry, grief into quest.

The Craft as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of destruction, I found myself working on a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted producing until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all longed for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond an art form: it was an act of defiance, of staying put, of holding on.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his prison cell, asking for more resources, insisting that language study become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, goal, rigor, anchor, and metaphor” all at once.

A Marked Work

And then came the picture. I saw it on a news site and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, marked but whole, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, stripped of life among the rubble and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but enduring.

I stared 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 bombardment, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, determined refusal to vanish.