Amid those Ruined Debris of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Volume I Had Translated

In the rubble of a fallen structure, a solitary sight stayed with me: a book I had converted from English to Farsi, resting partly concealed in dust and soot. Its jacket was torn and smudged, its sheets bent and scorched, but it was still readable. Still communicating.

A City Under Bombardment

Two days prior, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, forceful explosions. The web was completely disconnected. I was in my flat, rendering a text about what it means to transport text across cultures, and the ethics and anxieties of inhabiting another’s narrative. As structures came down, I sat editing a text that contended, in its quiet way, for the endurance of meaning.

Everything halted. A project my publishing house had been about to go to print was halted when the printing house ceased operations. Bookstores locked their doors one by one. One night, when the explosions were too nearby, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, holding reference books, hard-to-find books I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That library was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Distance and Devastation

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure areas – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a picture: in the background, a plant was ablaze, thick smoke spiraling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to pursue them.

During those days, emotions moved through the city like a storm: instant fear, apprehension, moral outrage at the wrong, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick searches and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, blast waves tore windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every pane was broken, the furniture lay damaged, objects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, painting at an stand, choosing not to let stillness and dust have the last word.

Converting Pain

A picture was shared digitally of a 23-year-old writer 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 books, I saw an elderly woman running between alleys, yelling a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some deep-seated remembrance. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: transforming destruction into picture, loss into poetry, sorrow into longing.

The Craft as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of destruction, I found myself working on a fable about a king whose daughter will recover 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 persisted creating until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than a skill: it was an act of perseverance, of holding one's ground, of persisting.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; 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 fact, aspiration, rigor, anchor, and analogy” all at once.

A Scarred Legacy

And then came the photograph. I noticed it on a news site and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, damaged but whole, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, devoid of life among the concrete and ruins. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – 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 true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else disappears. It is a persistent, determined refusal to disappear.