Within those Devastated Debris of an Apartment Block, I Found a Book I Had Translated

Among the wreckage of a fallen structure, a single sight stayed with me: a tome I had translated from the English language to Farsi, sitting partly concealed in dirt and ash. Its jacket was torn and dirtied, its leaves curled and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating.

A Metropolis Amid Attack

Two days earlier, projectiles started hitting the city. There were no sirens, just abrupt, powerful blasts. The web was totally severed. I was in my flat, working on a work about what it means to transport words across languages, and the principles and worries of taking on a different perspective. As buildings fell, I sat editing a text that argued, in its understated way, for the persistence of significance.

Everything ceased. A book my publisher had been about to send to press was stranded when the printer shut down. Bookstores closed one by one. One night, when the booms were too nearby, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, holding lexicons, rare books I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Dispersal and Loss

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure areas – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a picture: in the faraway, a factory was ablaze, black smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like a front: swift terror, apprehension, moral outrage at the unfairness, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant look-ups and references that translation demands.

Outside, concussive forces blew windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the furniture lay broken, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, painting at an easel, declining to let stillness and debris have the last word.

Converting Pain

A picture circulated on social media of a young writer who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman running between alleys, calling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

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

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of devastation, I found myself rendering a fable about a king whose daughter will get better 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 producing until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than literary craft: it was an act of perseverance, of staying put, of holding on.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his confinement, asking for more resources, insisting that linguistic work become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, goal, rigor, support, and analogy” all at once.

A Marked Legacy

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

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 full weight 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 haul stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, unyielding declination to be silenced.