Amid those Ruined Remains of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Book I’d Translated

Within the rubble of a destroyed building, a solitary vision remained with me: a tome I had translated from the English language to Farsi, sitting partially covered in dirt and soot. Its front was torn and smudged, its pages curled and scorched, but it was still decipherable. Still uttering words.

A City During Bombardment

Two days prior, rockets began striking the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, forceful blasts. The internet was totally severed. I was in my flat, working on a book about what it means to carry text across tongues, and the morals and concerns of occupying a different voice. As structures came down, I sat editing a text that argued, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything ceased. A book my publisher had been about to publish was halted when the printing house ceased operations. Bookstores shut one by one. One night, when the booms were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, holding dictionaries, rare books I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Separation and Grief

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure locations – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a photo: in the distance, a industrial site was burning, black smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and peril seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions moved through the city like weather: swift terror, unease, indignation at the injustice, then detachment. Beyond the emotional toll, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and references that the work demands.

Outside, shockwaves ripped windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every pane was broken, the possessions lay damaged, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, painting at an easel, declining to let silence and debris have the last word.

Transforming Sorrow

A photograph spread online of a young poet who was lost 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 running between alleyways, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some buried recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

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

Translation as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of devastation, I found myself rendering a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will heal 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 kept working until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all longed for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than a skill: it was an act of defiance, of staying put, of holding on.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his prison cell, asking for more resources, insisting that language study become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, hope, rigor, foundation, and symbol” all at once.

An Enduring Legacy

And then came the image. I spotted it on a website and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, marked but surviving, my name displayed 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 unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but surviving.

I gazed upon 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 forgotten. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, stubborn declination to vanish.