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

Among the debris of a fallen building, a single vision stayed with me: a book I had translated from English to Farsi, sitting half-buried in dust and ash. Its jacket was torn and dirtied, its pages curled and burned, but it was still legible. Still uttering words.

A City Amid Bombardment

Two days before, missiles began striking the city. There were no sirens, just unexpected, violent blasts. The digital network was completely severed. I was in my residence, translating a text about what it means to move text across tongues, and the morals and concerns of inhabiting a different voice. As structures fell, I sat polishing a text that argued, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of significance.

Everything halted. A book my publishing house had been about to send to press was stranded when the facility shut down. Retailers locked their doors one by one. One night, when the blasts were too nearby, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop thinking about the library in my apartment, stocked with reference books, valuable books I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That library was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Distance and Devastation

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be safer towns – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a image: in the distance, a plant was burning, black smoke coiling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and danger seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods swept through the city like weather: sudden dread, unease, righteous anger at the injustice, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the bombardment eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick searches and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their sashes; at a family member's house, every window was shattered, the furniture lay broken, objects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, painting at an easel, choosing not to let quiet and dust have the last word.

Converting Pain

A picture spread online of a 23-year-old writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly next to her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an elderly woman hurrying between alleyways, shouting a name. People said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some repressed remembrance. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: changing destruction into image, death into poetry, grief into longing.

The Craft as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself rendering a fable 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 experienced the loss of his sight yet continued working until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all yearned for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than a skill: it was an act of resistance, of staying put, of persisting.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that translation become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, hope, rigor, foundation, and analogy” all at once.

A Scarred Legacy

And then came the image. I saw it on a platform and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, marked but surviving, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been devoid of color, drained of life among the debris and ruins. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – 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 true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under fire, 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 persist when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, unyielding refusal to vanish.