Amid those Ruined Remains of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Book I’d Rendered

In the wreckage of a collapsed apartment block, a solitary sight lingered with me: a book I had converted from the English language to Persian, sitting half-buried in dirt and soot. Its front was ripped and dirtied, its sheets curled and singed, but it was still legible. Still uttering words.

A City During Bombardment

Two days earlier, rockets began striking the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, violent blasts. The internet was totally severed. I was in my apartment, working on a book about what it means to carry text across languages, and the morals and anxieties of occupying another’s narrative. As edifices fell, I sat revising a text that contended, in its understated way, for the endurance of purpose.

Everything halted. A project my publishing house had been about to go to print was stranded when the printer ceased operations. Bookstores closed one by one. One night, when the booms were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, filled with lexicons, hard-to-find volumes I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That library was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Distance and Devastation

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous areas – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a photo: in the distance, a plant was ablaze, thick smoke spiraling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to follow them.

During those days, feelings swept through the city like a front: swift terror, apprehension, indignation at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the emotional toll, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate searches and materials that the work demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every pane was broken, the belongings lay broken, household items scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, painting at an stand, refusing to let silence and debris have the ultimate victory.

Converting Pain

A photograph spread digitally of a 23-year-old poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her poem went was widely shared with her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an elderly woman running between alleyways, calling a name. People said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some repressed memory. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: turning ruin into image, death into verse, grief into quest.

The Craft as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still amidst ruin, I found myself rendering 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 significant meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet kept working until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all desired – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than a skill: it was an act of resistance, of holding one's ground, of holding on.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his prison cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that language study 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 Legacy

And then came the image. I spotted it on a platform and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, damaged but whole, my name printed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been black and white, drained of life among the rubble and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but enduring.

I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the full weight of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, unyielding declination to be silenced.