Within the Ruined Remains of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Book I’d Translated

Among the wreckage of a fallen building, a solitary vision remained with me: a tome I had converted from the English language to Farsi, sitting partially covered in dirt and soot. Its front was shredded and stained, its leaves bent and scorched, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating.

An Urban Center Amid Bombardment

Two days earlier, rockets started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, violent blasts. The internet was completely severed. I was in my residence, rendering a text about what it means to carry language across tongues, and the morals and concerns of inhabiting a different voice. As structures came down, I sat polishing a text that argued, in its quiet way, for the endurance of meaning.

Everything halted. A book my publisher had been about to send to press was stranded when the printer closed. Shops locked their doors one by one. One night, when the explosions were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop worrying about the bookshelves in my apartment, holding reference books, hard-to-find books I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Distance and Devastation

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure towns – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a photo: in the distance, a factory was burning, dark smoke spiraling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to chase them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like weather: sudden dread, unease, indignation at the wrong, then apathy. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick look-ups and references that translation demands.

Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was destroyed, the possessions lay ruined, objects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an stand, choosing not to let silence and debris have the final say.

Transforming Sorrow

A image spread 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 books, I saw an older woman dashing between alleys, yelling a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some deep-seated recollection. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: transforming ruin into picture, demise into verse, grief into search.

The Work as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself working on a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will get better 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 producing until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all yearned for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than literary craft: it was an act of defiance, of staying put, of holding on.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a prison; 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, rigor, foundation, and metaphor” all at once.

An Enduring Voice

And then came the picture. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, marked but intact, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, stripped of life among the debris and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but surviving.

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 was important”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else falls away. It is a persistent, stubborn refusal to disappear.