Among the Devastated Debris of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Volume I Had Translated

Within the rubble of a fallen apartment block, a single vision remained with me: a volume I had translated from English to Farsi, lying partly concealed in dirt and ash. Its cover was ripped and dirtied, its sheets bent and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still uttering words.

A Metropolis Amid Assault

Two days earlier, projectiles started hitting the city. There were no sirens, just abrupt, violent blasts. The internet was entirely disconnected. I was in my flat, rendering a book about what it means to carry words across tongues, and the principles and anxieties of inhabiting another’s perspective. As structures came down, I sat editing a text that contended, in its quiet way, for the persistence of purpose.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publisher had been about to publish was stuck when the printer shut down. Bookstores closed one by one. One night, when the explosions were too nearby, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop worrying about the bookshelves in my apartment, holding dictionaries, hard-to-find editions I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Distance and Loss

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous locations – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a photo: in the distance, a plant was ablaze, black smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and peril seemed to follow them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like weather: instant terror, apprehension, moral outrage at the wrong, then numbness. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick queries and sources that the craft demands.

Outside, blast waves tore windows from their casings; at a family member's house, every window was destroyed, the furniture lay ruined, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, creating at an stand, choosing not to let quiet and dirt have the ultimate victory.

Transforming Grief

A image circulated online of a young poet who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral with her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an older woman running between passages, calling a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some deep-seated memory. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: transforming ruin into picture, death into lines, sorrow into quest.

Translation as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst destruction, I found myself working on a fable about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet kept creating until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all longed for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond literary craft: it was an act of defiance, of staying put, of persisting.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his cell, asking for more books, insisting that linguistic work become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, goal, rigor, foundation, and symbol” all at once.

A Marked Legacy

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

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 fire, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, stubborn rejection to vanish.