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

Within the rubble of a destroyed building, a solitary vision lingered with me: a book I had converted from English to Persian, sitting half-buried in dust and ash. Its jacket was torn and stained, its pages bent and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still uttering words.

An Urban Center Under Attack

Two days before, missiles started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, violent explosions. The web was entirely disconnected. I was in my apartment, rendering a book about what it means to move words across languages, and the morals and worries of taking on someone else's perspective. As structures fell, I sat editing a text that contended, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to send to press was stuck when the facility ceased operations. Bookstores shut one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop thinking about the bookshelves in my apartment, holding reference books, hard-to-find volumes I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Dispersal and Grief

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be safer locations – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a photo: in the background, a plant was burning, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to pursue them.

During those days, emotions passed over the city like a storm: instant terror, apprehension, moral outrage at the injustice, then apathy. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick queries and materials that the work demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every window was destroyed, the belongings lay damaged, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, creating at an easel, refusing to let silence and debris have the ultimate victory.

Transforming Grief

A photograph was shared online of a 23-year-old writer 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 reference materials, I saw an aged woman dashing between alleys, yelling a name. People said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some buried remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: transforming devastation into image, death into poetry, mourning into search.

Translation as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst devastation, I found myself rendering a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will recover 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 kept producing until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all yearned for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth striving for.

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 bright sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his prison cell, asking for more books, insisting that translation become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, aspiration, practice, foundation, and symbol” all at once.

A Marked Work

And then came the picture. I noticed it on a website and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, marked but surviving, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, 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 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 was important”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else crumbles. It is a subtle, stubborn rejection to vanish.