Within the Ruined Debris of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Book I’d Translated

In the debris of a collapsed structure, a solitary sight remained with me: a book I had translated from the English language to Persian, sitting partly concealed in dirt and soot. Its front was shredded and stained, its pages bent and singed, but it was still legible. Still communicating.

A Metropolis During Bombardment

Two days prior, missiles started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, forceful blasts. The internet was completely cut off. I was in my apartment, rendering a work about what it means to move text across tongues, and the morals and anxieties of inhabiting a different perspective. As structures collapsed, I sat editing a text that suggested, in its subtle way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything halted. A manuscript my publisher had been about to send to press was stranded when the facility shut down. Retailers closed one by one. One night, when the booms were too nearby, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, stocked with reference books, hard-to-find volumes I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That library was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Distance and Grief

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous locations – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a photo: in the distance, a plant was ablaze, dark smoke coiling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods moved through the city like a storm: swift fear, anxiety, moral outrage at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick queries and sources that translation demands.

Outside, blast waves tore windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every pane was shattered, the furniture lay ruined, household items scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, working at an easel, declining to let stillness and debris have the ultimate victory.

Transforming Grief

A image spread online of a young writer who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an aged woman hurrying between passages, calling a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some deep-seated recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: transforming ruin into image, death into lines, mourning into longing.

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst ruin, I found myself working on a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep 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 striving for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all longed for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth pursuing.

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

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

An Enduring 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 works, damaged but whole, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, drained of life among the debris 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 statement”, but I had never felt the full weight of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else crumbles. It is a subtle, unyielding rejection to be silenced.