Among those Ruined Debris of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Volume I Had Translated

Among the wreckage of a fallen apartment block, a particular vision lingered with me: a volume I had converted from English to Farsi, sitting partly concealed in dust and soot. Its cover was shredded and dirtied, 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 sirens, just abrupt, forceful detonations. The web was entirely cut off. I was in my flat, working on a work about what it means to transport words across tongues, and the ethics and concerns of taking on a different narrative. As structures collapsed, I sat polishing a text that contended, in its subtle way, for the persistence of meaning.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to send to press was stuck when the facility closed. Retailers locked their doors one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the bookshelves in my apartment, filled with lexicons, rare editions I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Distance and Devastation

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous towns – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a photo: in the background, a factory was burning, dark smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to pursue them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like a front: sudden terror, unease, moral outrage at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant look-ups and sources that the work demands.

Outside, concussive forces ripped windows from their sashes; at a relative's house, every pane was broken, the possessions lay damaged, objects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, painting at an stand, refusing to let stillness and debris have the last word.

Translating Grief

A photograph circulated online of a 23-year-old writer who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an elderly woman running between passages, yelling a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some repressed memory. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: turning ruin into image, death into verse, mourning into search.

Translation as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of destruction, I found myself rendering a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet persisted working until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unreachable. 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 more than an art form: it was an act of defiance, of holding one's ground, of enduring.

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

A Marked Legacy

And then came the picture. I spotted it on a platform and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, scarred but whole, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, stripped of life among the concrete and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but persisting.

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 full weight of this until then. To translate, even under fire, 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 persist when everything else disappears. It is a persistent, unyielding refusal to be silenced.