Amid those Ruined Debris of an Apartment Block, I Found a Book I Had Rendered

Within the debris of a destroyed apartment block, a particular sight remained with me: a volume I had rendered from English to Farsi, resting partly concealed in dirt and ash. Its jacket was ripped and smudged, its leaves bent and scorched, but it was still legible. Still speaking.

An Urban Center Under Bombardment

Two days prior, projectiles started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, powerful explosions. The digital network was totally disconnected. I was in my residence, translating a text about what it means to carry text across languages, and the principles and anxieties of taking on a different voice. As buildings came down, I sat editing a text that argued, in its understated way, for the persistence of significance.

Everything halted. A book my publishing house had been about to send to press was stuck when the printing house ceased operations. Bookstores locked their doors one by one. One night, when the booms were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop worrying about the library in my apartment, stocked with reference books, valuable books I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Separation and Loss

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure towns – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a factory was on fire, dark smoke curling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to chase them.

During those days, moods passed over the city like a storm: swift dread, apprehension, indignation at the unfairness, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the bombardment destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and references that the work demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every window was destroyed, the furniture lay ruined, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, creating at an stand, declining to let silence and dirt have the last word.

Transforming Grief

A image circulated digitally of a 23-year-old artist who was died when missiles struck a building. Her writing went was widely shared next to her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman hurrying between passages, yelling a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some repressed recollection. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: changing destruction into image, loss into verse, grief into search.

Translation as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by ruin, I found myself translating a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted working until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all desired – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth pursuing.

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

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his confinement, asking for more resources, insisting that translation become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, goal, rigor, anchor, and metaphor” all at once.

A Marked Voice

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 translations, marked but whole, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, stripped of life among the debris and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but enduring.

I stared at 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 obliterated. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, unyielding declination to vanish.