Within the Devastated Remains of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Book I Had Translated

Within the wreckage of a collapsed building, a single sight lingered with me: a tome I had converted from English to Farsi, sitting partially covered in dirt and ash. Its jacket was shredded and stained, its leaves curled and burned, but it was still readable. Still speaking.

A Metropolis Under Attack

Two days earlier, rockets began striking the city. There were no alarms, just sudden, powerful blasts. The digital network was totally severed. I was in my apartment, translating a text about what it means to carry language across cultures, and the principles and concerns of occupying someone else's voice. As edifices came down, I sat editing a text that argued, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of significance.

Everything stopped. A project my publishing house had been about to publish was stranded when the printer ceased operations. Retailers closed one by one. One night, when the explosions were too close, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop thinking about the bookshelves in my apartment, filled with reference books, valuable volumes I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Distance and Loss

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous towns – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a picture: in the background, a factory was burning, thick smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly somewhere else, and peril seemed to chase them.

During those days, feelings moved through the city like a front: swift dread, anxiety, moral outrage at the injustice, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick searches and references that the work demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their frames; at a relative's house, every window was shattered, the belongings lay damaged, household items scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, painting at an easel, choosing not to let stillness and dirt have the final say.

Translating Grief

A photograph was shared online of a young writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went viral alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an aged woman hurrying between passages, shouting a name. People said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some buried recollection. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: changing destruction into art, loss into lines, sorrow into quest.

The Craft as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of 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 significant meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet continued producing until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all desired – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond an art form: it was an act of perseverance, of remaining, of enduring.

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

A Marked Voice

And then came the picture. I saw it on a platform and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, damaged but whole, 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 concrete and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but persisting.

I stared at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a political act”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, unyielding declination to disappear.