Among the Ruined Remains of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Book I’d Translated

In the debris of a destroyed apartment block, a solitary vision remained with me: a tome I had translated from the English language to Persian, lying partly concealed in dust and soot. Its front was torn and dirtied, its leaves bent and burned, but it was still legible. Still communicating.

A Metropolis Amid Attack

Two days before, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, violent explosions. The digital network was entirely cut off. I was in my flat, translating a text about what it means to carry words across cultures, and the principles and concerns of taking on someone else's voice. As edifices collapsed, I sat revising a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the endurance of purpose.

Everything halted. A manuscript my publisher had been about to go to print was stuck when the facility ceased operations. Bookstores closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the shelves in my apartment, stocked with reference books, hard-to-find books I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Dispersal and Loss

My companion 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 image: in the distance, a industrial site was on fire, black smoke coiling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to chase them.

During those days, moods passed over the city like weather: swift terror, anxiety, righteous anger at the wrong, then numbness. Beyond the psychological cost, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every pane was destroyed, the furniture lay damaged, household items scattered 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.

Converting Grief

A photograph spread digitally of a young poet who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly next to her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an elderly woman running between alleyways, calling a name. People said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some repressed remembrance. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: turning ruin into picture, demise into verse, grief into search.

The Work as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of devastation, I found myself rendering a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted working until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all longed for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than a skill: it was an act of resistance, of remaining, of holding on.

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

A Marked Voice

And then came the image. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, marked but surviving, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, drained of life among the rubble and ruins. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but persisting.

I gazed upon 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 mattered”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else falls away. It is a persistent, stubborn rejection to be silenced.