Amid those Ruined Remains of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Book I Had Rendered

Within the rubble of a collapsed structure, a particular sight remained with me: a tome I had translated from English to Farsi, sitting partially covered in dust and soot. Its front was torn and dirtied, its pages curled and singed, but it was still readable. Still speaking.

A Metropolis Amid Attack

Two days prior, rockets commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, violent detonations. The internet was completely cut off. I was in my flat, working on a work about what it means to carry words across tongues, and the morals and anxieties of occupying another’s narrative. As edifices came down, I sat polishing a text that contended, in its subtle way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything stopped. A book my publisher had been about to send to press was halted when the printing house closed. Shops locked their doors one by one. One night, when the booms were too nearby, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the library in my apartment, holding lexicons, hard-to-find books I had spent years collecting 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.

Separation and Devastation

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be safer towns – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a photo: in the faraway, a factory was on fire, dark smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to pursue them.

During those days, moods moved through the city like a front: swift dread, unease, moral outrage at the wrong, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate queries and references that translation demands.

Outside, blast waves blew windows from their casings; at a family member's house, every window was destroyed, the furniture lay damaged, personal effects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, creating at an stand, choosing not to let quiet and debris have the ultimate victory.

Translating Sorrow

A image circulated online of a 23-year-old poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared with her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman dashing between alleys, calling a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some deep-seated recollection. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: turning ruin into picture, loss into verse, grief into longing.

The Work as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of destruction, I found myself rendering a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet kept creating until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all longed for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than an art form: 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 political thinker in his cell, asking for more books, insisting that translation become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, goal, rigor, anchor, and metaphor” all at once.

An Enduring Work

And then came the image. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, damaged but whole, 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 ruins. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but enduring.

I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, 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 transport stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else falls away. It is a quiet, unyielding rejection to disappear.