Amid the Ruined Debris of an Apartment Block, I Found a Volume I’d Translated

In the wreckage of a collapsed apartment block, a solitary image lingered with me: a tome I had rendered from English to Farsi, lying partially covered in dust and soot. Its jacket was ripped and smudged, its leaves curled and burned, but it was still readable. Still speaking.

A City Amid Attack

Two days earlier, missiles started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just sudden, powerful explosions. The internet was totally disconnected. I was in my residence, rendering a work about what it means to transport language across cultures, and the morals and worries of taking on a different voice. As buildings fell, I sat editing a text that contended, in its subtle way, for the persistence of meaning.

Everything halted. A project my publisher had been about to send to press was stranded when the printing house ceased operations. Shops closed one by one. One night, when the booms were too close, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the library in my apartment, stocked with lexicons, valuable books I had spent years accumulating 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 survive the night.

Dispersal and Grief

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous locations – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a picture: in the distance, a factory was ablaze, dark smoke spiraling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like a front: swift dread, apprehension, righteous anger at the wrong, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and references that the craft demands.

Outside, shockwaves ripped windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every pane was destroyed, the belongings lay ruined, household items scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, creating at an stand, choosing not to let silence and debris have the ultimate victory.

Converting Pain

A picture was shared online of a 23-year-old poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went was widely shared next to her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an older woman running between alleyways, calling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some deep-seated memory. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: changing destruction into image, loss into poetry, mourning into search.

The Work as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by ruin, I found myself translating a fable about a king whose daughter will recover 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 persisted creating until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all desired – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than an art form: it was an act of resistance, of holding one's ground, of persisting.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his prison cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that language study become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, hope, rigor, support, and symbol” all at once.

An Enduring Legacy

And then came the photograph. I saw it on a news site and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, damaged but surviving, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, stripped of life among the concrete and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but persisting.

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 complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under attack, 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 remain when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, stubborn refusal to vanish.