Among the Devastated Debris of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Book I’d Translated

In the wreckage of a collapsed structure, a solitary image lingered with me: a volume I had rendered from English to Persian, resting half-buried in dirt and soot. Its jacket was torn and smudged, its pages bent and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still uttering words.

A City Under Assault

Two days before, rockets commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, forceful explosions. The web was completely severed. I was in my apartment, working on a text about what it means to move language across languages, and the principles and concerns of occupying a different voice. As buildings came down, I sat editing a text that argued, in its subtle way, for the persistence of meaning.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publisher had been about to send to press was halted when the facility shut down. Bookstores 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 dwelling on the library in my apartment, filled with lexicons, valuable volumes I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Distance and Grief

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure towns – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a photo: in the background, a factory was on fire, black smoke curling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, emotions moved through the city like weather: sudden fear, unease, righteous anger at the unfairness, then numbness. Beyond the psychological cost, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick queries and references that the work demands.

Outside, concussive forces ripped windows from their casings; at a family member's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the possessions lay broken, household items scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, painting at an easel, refusing to let stillness and dirt have the ultimate victory.

Transforming Grief

A photograph circulated on social media of a young poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her poem went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an elderly woman hurrying between alleys, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some deep-seated memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: transforming ruin into image, loss into lines, sorrow into quest.

The Craft as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of ruin, I found myself rendering a fable about a king whose daughter will heal 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 calm 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 perseverance, of holding one's ground, of persisting.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his confinement, asking for more books, insisting that translation become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, aspiration, practice, support, and symbol” all at once.

An Enduring Legacy

And then came the picture. I spotted it on a platform and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, damaged but intact, my name printed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been black and white, drained of life among the concrete and ruins. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but persisting.

I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the full weight of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else crumbles. It is a subtle, unyielding declination to disappear.