Amid those Ruined Debris of an Apartment Block, I Found a Book I’d Rendered

Within the debris of a fallen apartment block, a single sight stayed with me: a book I had translated from the English language to Farsi, lying partly concealed in dust and ash. Its jacket was ripped and dirtied, its pages curled and singed, but it was still readable. Still communicating.

A City Amid Attack

Two days earlier, missiles commenced attacking the city. There were no sirens, just abrupt, forceful blasts. The web was completely severed. I was in my flat, rendering a work about what it means to move language across tongues, and the morals and anxieties of occupying someone else's narrative. As buildings fell, I sat revising a text that contended, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of significance.

Everything stopped. A book my publisher had been about to go to print was halted when the printer shut down. Shops locked their doors one by one. One night, when the explosions 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, stocked with reference books, rare volumes I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Separation and Devastation

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure locations – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a photo: in the distance, a industrial site was ablaze, thick smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods passed over the city like weather: sudden terror, anxiety, righteous anger at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick searches and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, shockwaves ripped windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the belongings lay damaged, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an easel, declining to let stillness and dust have the final say.

Converting Grief

A picture circulated online of a young writer who was died when missiles struck a building. Her poem went was widely shared next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman running between alleyways, yelling a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some repressed remembrance. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: transforming ruin into image, demise into verse, sorrow into search.

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of destruction, I found myself translating a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can hold 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 aiming at the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than literary craft: it was an act of defiance, of holding one's ground, of enduring.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his confinement, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that translation become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, hope, practice, foundation, and analogy” all at once.

An Enduring Voice

And then came the photograph. I saw it on a website and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, marked but intact, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, devoid 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 apparent – scarred, but enduring.

I stared 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 bombardment, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else falls away. It is a subtle, stubborn refusal to be silenced.