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

Among the debris of a fallen building, a solitary image stayed with me: a volume I had converted from English to Persian, resting partly concealed in dirt and ash. Its cover was torn and dirtied, its sheets curled and burned, but it was still readable. Still communicating.

A City Amid Attack

Two days earlier, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, powerful explosions. The digital network was completely severed. I was in my apartment, translating a text about what it means to transport words across cultures, and the principles and concerns of taking on another’s voice. As buildings collapsed, I sat revising a text that suggested, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of significance.

Everything stopped. A project my publisher had been about to go to print was stranded when the printer ceased operations. Shops closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the bookshelves in my apartment, holding reference books, hard-to-find editions I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Dispersal and Devastation

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous areas – places that, days later, were also targeted. 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 on fire, thick smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and danger seemed to pursue them.

During those days, moods swept through the city like a storm: sudden dread, apprehension, indignation at the unfairness, then numbness. Beyond the emotional toll, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and materials that the work demands.

Outside, blast waves ripped windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every pane was destroyed, the possessions lay damaged, objects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, painting at an easel, choosing not to let quiet and dust have the last word.

Converting Pain

A image circulated online of a 23-year-old artist who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her poem went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an elderly woman hurrying between passages, calling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some repressed memory. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: changing devastation into art, loss into poetry, sorrow into longing.

The Craft as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by ruin, I found myself translating a fable about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet kept creating until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all longed for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth pursuing.

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 political thinker in his prison cell, asking for more resources, insisting that translation become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, aspiration, practice, support, and symbol” all at once.

A Scarred Work

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 works, marked but intact, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, drained of life among the rubble and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but surviving.

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 complete significance 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 carry stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else falls away. It is a subtle, stubborn rejection to be silenced.