Among the Devastated Debris of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Volume I’d Translated

Within the wreckage of a collapsed structure, a particular vision stayed with me: a book I had converted from English to Farsi, lying partially covered in dust and soot. Its front was shredded and dirtied, its leaves curled and scorched, but it was still readable. Still communicating.

A City Under Assault

Two days earlier, rockets started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, powerful blasts. The digital network was completely disconnected. I was in my flat, translating a work about what it means to move text across cultures, and the ethics and worries of inhabiting someone else's narrative. As structures came down, I sat polishing a text that contended, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything ceased. A book my publisher had been about to send to press was halted when the facility shut down. Bookstores shut one by one. One night, when the explosions were too nearby, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the bookshelves in my apartment, filled with dictionaries, hard-to-find books I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Dispersal and Loss

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure areas – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a picture: in the faraway, a plant was ablaze, dark smoke coiling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions moved through the city like a storm: instant terror, anxiety, righteous anger at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and references that the work demands.

Outside, blast waves ripped windows from their frames; at a relative's house, every window was broken, the belongings lay damaged, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, creating at an stand, refusing to let quiet and debris have the final say.

Transforming Grief

A picture circulated on social media of a young writer who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman hurrying between alleyways, calling a name. People said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried memory. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: transforming destruction into image, loss into verse, grief into search.

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself translating a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will get better 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 kept working until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unattainable. 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 greater than literary craft: it was an act of resistance, of remaining, of holding on.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that language study become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, goal, rigor, support, and metaphor” all at once.

A Marked Voice

And then came the picture. I spotted it on a website and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, scarred but intact, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, devoid of life among the rubble and debris. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but enduring.

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 full weight of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, stubborn refusal to vanish.