Among the Devastated Remains of an Apartment Block, I Found a Book I’d Rendered

Among the debris of a destroyed apartment block, a single vision lingered with me: a tome I had converted from English to Persian, sitting partly concealed in dust and soot. Its jacket was shredded and dirtied, its sheets curled and scorched, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking.

A Metropolis During Assault

Two days before, rockets commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, forceful blasts. The internet was completely severed. I was in my residence, working on a book about what it means to move language across tongues, and the principles and worries of inhabiting another’s voice. As buildings came down, I sat revising a text that contended, in its understated way, for the endurance of meaning.

Everything halted. A manuscript my publisher had been about to publish was stranded when the printing house closed. Shops locked their doors one by one. One night, when the booms were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop thinking about the library in my apartment, holding dictionaries, rare editions I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That library was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Separation and Grief

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be safer locations – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a factory was ablaze, dark smoke spiraling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to follow them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like weather: sudden dread, unease, moral outrage at the unfairness, then detachment. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate queries and materials that translation demands.

Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their sashes; at a family member's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the possessions lay broken, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, working at an stand, refusing to let quiet and debris have the ultimate victory.

Translating Grief

A photograph spread online of a young writer who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an elderly woman hurrying between alleyways, yelling a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a conflict 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 converting, in our own way: changing devastation into picture, demise into lines, grief into search.

The Work as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of devastation, I found myself translating a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant 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 reaching for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond literary craft: it was an act of defiance, of holding one's ground, of persisting.

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

An Enduring Legacy

And then came the photograph. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, marked but intact, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, devoid 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 enduring.

I looked 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 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 endure when everything else disappears. It is a persistent, stubborn declination to vanish.