Within the Ruined Remains of an Apartment Block, I Found a Book I Had Translated

Within the debris of a destroyed building, a particular image stayed with me: a book I had rendered from English to Persian, lying partly concealed in dirt and soot. Its cover was ripped and smudged, its leaves bent and singed, but it was still readable. Still communicating.

A City During Bombardment

Two days before, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no sirens, just abrupt, violent blasts. The web was completely severed. I was in my flat, rendering a text about what it means to move text across languages, and the ethics and anxieties of taking on a different narrative. As structures collapsed, I sat editing a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the persistence of meaning.

Everything ceased. A book my publishing house had been about to send to press was stuck when the printer closed. Bookstores locked their doors one by one. One night, when the booms were too nearby, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, stocked with reference books, valuable volumes I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Distance and Grief

My partner 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 distance, a plant was on fire, dark smoke coiling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods moved through the city like a storm: sudden terror, anxiety, indignation at the injustice, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick searches and references that the craft demands.

Outside, blast waves blew windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was destroyed, the furniture lay damaged, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, creating at an easel, declining to let silence and dust have the last word.

Converting Pain

A picture spread on social media of a young artist who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral with her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an elderly woman hurrying between alleyways, calling a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: turning ruin into image, loss into poetry, sorrow into search.

Translation as Resistance

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 deep meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet continued creating until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unreachable. 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 greater than an art form: it was an act of defiance, of holding one's ground, of enduring.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a facility; 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 reality, aspiration, discipline, anchor, and metaphor” all at once.

A Scarred Legacy

And then came the picture. I noticed it on a news site and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, scarred but whole, my name printed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, drained of life among the concrete and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but persisting.

I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a political act”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else disappears. It is a persistent, stubborn declination to be silenced.