Amid the Devastated Debris of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Book I’d Rendered

Among the wreckage of a fallen structure, a single sight stayed with me: a book I had converted from the English language to Farsi, sitting partly concealed in dirt and soot. Its front was torn and stained, its leaves curled and singed, but it was still legible. Still uttering words.

A Metropolis Under Assault

Two days before, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just sudden, forceful blasts. The digital network was totally severed. I was in my flat, working on a text about what it means to move words across tongues, and the ethics and anxieties of taking on another’s perspective. As structures collapsed, I sat editing a text that contended, in its subtle way, for the endurance of meaning.

Everything halted. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to publish was halted when the printer shut down. Bookstores shut one by one. One night, when the blasts were too nearby, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the library in my apartment, filled with dictionaries, valuable volumes I had spent years collecting 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.

Separation and Grief

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure 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 image: in the faraway, a industrial site was on fire, dark smoke spiraling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods swept through the city like a storm: swift fear, anxiety, indignation at the injustice, then apathy. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate queries and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every pane was broken, the furniture lay broken, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, painting at an stand, choosing not to let silence and debris have the ultimate victory.

Transforming Pain

A photograph was shared digitally of a 23-year-old artist who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared next to her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an elderly woman running between passages, calling a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some deep-seated remembrance. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

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

The Work as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself rendering a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will heal 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 continued working until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all longed for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than an art form: it was an act of defiance, 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 cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that linguistic work become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, hope, practice, support, and symbol” all at once.

An Enduring Legacy

And then came the picture. I spotted it on a platform and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, scarred but surviving, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, devoid of life among the concrete and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but persisting.

I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under attack, 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 persist when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, unyielding refusal to vanish.