Amid the Devastated Debris of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Book I’d Rendered

Among the debris of a collapsed structure, a particular vision lingered with me: a volume I had converted from English to Persian, resting partially covered in dust and soot. Its front was torn and smudged, its pages bent and singed, but it was still legible. Still speaking.

An Urban Center Amid Assault

Two days before, rockets started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, powerful detonations. The internet was completely severed. I was in my apartment, working on a work about what it means to transport text across cultures, and the ethics and worries of taking on someone else's perspective. As edifices came down, I sat revising a text that argued, in its subtle way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything stopped. A book my publishing house had been about to send to press was halted when the facility shut down. Retailers locked their doors one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop worrying about the bookshelves in my apartment, holding dictionaries, rare editions I had spent years collecting 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.

Dispersal and Devastation

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous locations – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a picture: in the distance, a plant was burning, dark smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, moods moved through the city like a storm: swift terror, apprehension, indignation at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant look-ups and sources that translation demands.

Outside, blast waves ripped windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every window was broken, the possessions lay broken, objects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, painting at an easel, declining to let silence and debris have the ultimate victory.

Translating Grief

A picture spread online of a 23-year-old writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went was widely shared with her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an older woman dashing between alleys, yelling a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: turning ruin into image, loss into lines, grief into search.

The Work as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still amidst destruction, I found myself rendering a fable about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet kept creating 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 more than a skill: it was an act of defiance, of remaining, of holding on.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his confinement, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that language study become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, hope, rigor, foundation, and metaphor” all at once.

An Enduring Work

And then came the image. I saw it on a website 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 devoid of color, drained of life among the rubble and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – 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 full weight of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, determined refusal to be silenced.