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

Within the debris of a fallen building, a single sight stayed with me: a book I had rendered from English to Persian, resting partially covered in dust and ash. Its cover was ripped and dirtied, its pages curled and singed, but it was still readable. Still speaking.

An Urban Center Amid Attack

Two days earlier, missiles started hitting the city. There were no sirens, just abrupt, powerful explosions. The digital network was completely disconnected. I was in my residence, working on a book about what it means to move text across cultures, and the morals and anxieties of inhabiting another’s perspective. As edifices came down, I sat revising a text that contended, in its understated way, for the persistence of meaning.

Everything stopped. A project my publishing house had been about to go to print was stuck when the facility ceased operations. Bookstores shut one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop thinking about the library in my apartment, holding reference books, hard-to-find editions I had spent years collecting 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 make it through the night.

Dispersal and Devastation

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be safer areas – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a photo: in the faraway, a plant was on fire, thick smoke curling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, emotions moved through the city like a front: instant terror, unease, moral outrage at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and sources that the work demands.

Outside, blast waves ripped windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every pane was shattered, the belongings lay ruined, objects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, painting at an stand, choosing not to let quiet and dirt have the last word.

Translating Grief

A photograph circulated online of a 23-year-old poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went viral alongside her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an elderly woman running between passages, yelling a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some repressed memory. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: changing devastation into picture, demise into verse, sorrow into quest.

The Work as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself rendering a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will recover 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 continued working until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all yearned for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond an art form: it was an act of resistance, of holding one's ground, of holding on.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his confinement, asking for more books, insisting that linguistic work become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, goal, discipline, support, and symbol” all at once.

A Marked Legacy

And then came the photograph. I saw it on a news site and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, marked but intact, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, drained 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 visible – scarred, but surviving.

I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a act with consequences”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, determined refusal to be silenced.