Within those Devastated Debris of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Volume I’d Translated

Among the rubble of a fallen building, a particular vision remained with me: a tome I had rendered from the English language to Farsi, lying half-buried in dirt and soot. Its jacket was shredded and dirtied, its sheets bent and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking.

A Metropolis Amid Attack

Two days earlier, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no sirens, just unexpected, violent detonations. The web was completely disconnected. I was in my apartment, rendering a work about what it means to transport words across languages, and the morals and concerns of inhabiting another’s voice. As buildings came down, I sat polishing a text that argued, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything ceased. A book my publisher had been about to go to print was halted when the facility closed. Shops closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the library in my apartment, holding dictionaries, rare editions I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Distance and Loss

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure locations – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a photo: in the faraway, a factory was burning, dark smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods passed over the city like weather: swift dread, anxiety, indignation at the wrong, then detachment. Beyond the emotional toll, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick look-ups and materials that translation demands.

Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their frames; at a relative's house, every sheet of glass was destroyed, the possessions lay broken, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an stand, refusing to let quiet and dust have the last word.

Translating Sorrow

A picture circulated on social media of a 23-year-old writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went viral with her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an elderly woman dashing between alleyways, calling a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some buried recollection. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: turning ruin into picture, loss into lines, grief into search.

The Craft as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still amidst devastation, I found myself working on a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant 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 reaching for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than an art form: it was an act of perseverance, of staying put, of holding on.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his confinement, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that linguistic work become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, hope, discipline, support, and metaphor” all at once.

A Marked Legacy

And then came the photograph. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, scarred but intact, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been devoid of color, stripped of life among the concrete and debris. For most of my career, I had been unseen, 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 political act”, 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 obliterated. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, unyielding refusal to vanish.