Amid the Devastated Remains of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Volume I’d Translated

In the debris of a fallen building, a single sight lingered with me: a book I had translated from English to Farsi, resting half-buried in dirt and ash. Its front was shredded and smudged, its pages curled and scorched, but it was still legible. Still speaking.

A City Amid Assault

Two days prior, projectiles began striking the city. There were no sirens, just sudden, violent explosions. The web was entirely disconnected. I was in my apartment, working on a text about what it means to transport words across tongues, and the morals and concerns of taking on someone else's narrative. As structures collapsed, 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 publish was halted when the printer shut down. Bookstores locked their doors one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the library in my apartment, stocked with reference books, rare books I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Distance and Loss

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be safer locations – 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 picture: in the background, a industrial site was on fire, thick smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to follow them.

During those days, feelings moved through the city like weather: instant fear, unease, moral outrage at the injustice, then detachment. Beyond the personal impact, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant look-ups and sources that the craft demands.

Outside, blast waves ripped windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every window was destroyed, the furniture lay ruined, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an stand, declining to let quiet and dust have the ultimate victory.

Transforming Sorrow

A picture circulated digitally of a young poet who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an elderly woman running between alleys, calling a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some buried recollection. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: turning ruin into art, death into poetry, grief into longing.

Translation as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of devastation, 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 persisted producing until the end of his life, understood something about striving for 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 beyond literary craft: it was an act of defiance, of staying put, of holding on.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his prison cell, asking for more books, insisting that language study become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, goal, discipline, foundation, and analogy” all at once.

A Scarred Voice

And then came the image. I noticed it on a news site and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, damaged but whole, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been black and white, stripped of life among the concrete and ruins. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but surviving.

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 true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else disappears. It is a subtle, unyielding refusal to be silenced.