Amid those Ruined Debris of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Book I’d Rendered

Among the debris of a collapsed structure, a particular vision stayed with me: a tome I had rendered from the English language to Farsi, sitting partially covered in dust and ash. Its cover was ripped and smudged, its sheets bent and scorched, but it was still readable. Still speaking.

A Metropolis Under Assault

Two days prior, missiles started hitting the city. There were no sirens, just sudden, forceful blasts. The internet was totally severed. I was in my apartment, translating a text about what it means to carry text across tongues, and the principles and anxieties of occupying a different narrative. As structures collapsed, I sat polishing a text that contended, in its subtle way, for the persistence of significance.

Everything halted. A manuscript my publisher had been about to go to print was halted when the facility shut down. Shops locked their doors one by one. One night, when the blasts were too nearby, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves 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 life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Distance and Loss

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be safer areas – places that, days later, were also hit. 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 on fire, black smoke coiling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to pursue them.

During those days, moods swept through the city like a storm: swift dread, anxiety, indignation at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and materials that translation demands.

Outside, concussive forces ripped windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every pane was shattered, the furniture lay ruined, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, working at an stand, refusing to let quiet and dirt have the final say.

Converting Sorrow

A picture spread digitally of a 23-year-old poet who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman running between passages, shouting 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 remembrance. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: changing devastation into picture, death into poetry, sorrow into search.

The Work as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst devastation, I found myself rendering a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will recover 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 producing 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 impossible, yet still worth reaching toward.

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

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

A Marked Legacy

And then came the picture. I spotted it on a website and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, marked but whole, my name printed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, devoid of life among the debris and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – 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 had significance”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else crumbles. It is a subtle, stubborn refusal to be silenced.