Amid those Ruined Debris of an Apartment Block, I Found a Book I’d Translated

In the wreckage of a fallen structure, a single image remained with me: a book I had translated from the English language to Farsi, sitting half-buried in dust and ash. Its jacket was ripped and dirtied, its leaves curled and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking.

A Metropolis Under Assault

Two days before, missiles commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, violent blasts. The web was totally cut off. I was in my flat, rendering a text about what it means to transport language across tongues, and the principles and anxieties of occupying someone else's voice. As structures came down, I sat editing a text that suggested, in its quiet way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything stopped. A book my publisher had been about to send to press was stuck when the facility closed. Shops 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 shelves in my apartment, stocked with lexicons, valuable volumes I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That library was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Distance and Grief

My companion 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 image: in the background, a plant was on fire, dark smoke curling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods passed over the city like a front: sudden terror, anxiety, righteous anger at the unfairness, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant look-ups and references that the work demands.

Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their sashes; at a relative's house, every pane was destroyed, the furniture lay broken, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, painting at an easel, choosing not to let quiet and dust have the ultimate victory.

Translating Grief

A image spread online of a 23-year-old artist who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her verse went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an older woman running between alleys, calling a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some buried remembrance. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: turning destruction into picture, demise into poetry, grief into longing.

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself working on a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet persisted working until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all longed for – 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 remaining, of enduring.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his cell, asking for more books, insisting that translation become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, goal, discipline, foundation, and analogy” all at once.

A Scarred Legacy

And then came the picture. I spotted it on a platform and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, damaged but surviving, 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 wreckage. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – 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 full weight of this until then. To translate, even under fire, 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 remain when everything else crumbles. It is a subtle, unyielding declination to be silenced.