Among the Devastated Remains of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Book I Had Rendered

Within the debris of a fallen building, a particular vision stayed with me: a volume I had translated from the English language to Persian, resting partially covered in dirt and soot. Its jacket was ripped and dirtied, its pages curled and burned, but it was still legible. Still communicating.

A Metropolis During Bombardment

Two days prior, rockets commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, powerful blasts. The digital network was entirely severed. I was in my apartment, working on a book about what it means to transport words across tongues, and the morals and anxieties of occupying another’s voice. As edifices fell, I sat editing a text that suggested, in its subtle way, for the persistence of purpose.

Everything halted. A manuscript my publisher had been about to go to print was stuck when the facility shut down. Bookstores closed one by one. One night, when the booms were too nearby, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop thinking about the bookshelves in my apartment, filled with lexicons, hard-to-find volumes I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Separation and Devastation

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be safer towns – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a picture: in the background, a industrial site was burning, dark smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to chase them.

During those days, emotions moved through the city like a storm: swift fear, apprehension, moral outrage at the wrong, then numbness. Beyond the emotional toll, the attack eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick look-ups and references that the work demands.

Outside, blast waves blew windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every pane was destroyed, the furniture lay broken, objects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, creating at an easel, refusing to let silence and dust have the final say.

Converting Grief

A picture circulated on social media of a young artist who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her poem went viral with her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman running between passages, yelling a name. People said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some repressed remembrance. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: turning devastation into image, death into poetry, sorrow into quest.

Translation as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of devastation, I found myself translating a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will recover 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 kept working until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all longed for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond an art form: it was an act of defiance, of holding one's ground, of enduring.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his prison cell, asking for more resources, insisting that translation become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, hope, discipline, foundation, and metaphor” all at once.

A Marked Voice

And then came the image. I noticed it on a news site and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, damaged but intact, my name printed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been black and white, drained of life among the concrete and debris. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, 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 fire, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, stubborn refusal to disappear.