Amid the Ruined Debris of an Apartment Block, I Found a Volume I Had Translated

In the rubble of a destroyed structure, a particular image remained with me: a tome I had translated from the English language to Persian, lying partially covered in dirt and soot. Its cover was ripped and smudged, its pages curled and burned, but it was still legible. Still communicating.

An Urban Center Under Assault

Two days prior, projectiles began striking the city. There were no warnings, just sudden, violent blasts. The digital network was entirely severed. I was in my flat, working on a work about what it means to move words across cultures, and the ethics and concerns of taking on someone else's perspective. As edifices came down, I sat polishing a text that argued, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything stopped. 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 blasts were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, holding dictionaries, valuable books I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Separation and Devastation

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure towns – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a photo: in the background, a industrial site was on fire, thick smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and danger seemed to pursue them.

During those days, feelings swept through the city like a storm: instant fear, unease, indignation at the unfairness, then numbness. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and sources that the work demands.

Outside, concussive forces ripped windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every window was shattered, the furniture lay ruined, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, painting at an easel, choosing not to let silence and dust have the ultimate victory.

Converting Grief

A image was shared digitally of a 23-year-old poet who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an older woman hurrying between passages, calling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some deep-seated remembrance. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: changing ruin into art, loss into lines, mourning into search.

Translation as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by ruin, I found myself translating a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet persisted working until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all longed for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than a skill: it was an act of defiance, of staying put, of holding on.

One day, in broad 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 translation become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, hope, discipline, anchor, and analogy” all at once.

An Enduring 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 intact, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, stripped of life among the debris 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 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 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 endure when everything else falls away. It is a persistent, unyielding refusal to vanish.