Among the Devastated Remains of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Book I’d Translated

Within the wreckage of a destroyed apartment block, a solitary vision stayed with me: a book I had translated from the English language to Persian, sitting half-buried in dust and soot. Its front was ripped and stained, its leaves bent and scorched, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking.

A Metropolis Under Attack

Two days prior, missiles commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, powerful explosions. The digital network was completely disconnected. I was in my residence, translating a book about what it means to move language across tongues, and the ethics and concerns of taking on a different perspective. As edifices collapsed, I sat editing a text that argued, in its quiet way, for the persistence of purpose.

Everything halted. A book my publishing house had been about to send to press was stuck when the printing house shut down. Shops closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop worrying about the bookshelves in my apartment, filled with lexicons, valuable books I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Dispersal and Devastation

My spouse 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 picture: in the distance, a plant was ablaze, dark smoke spiraling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to follow them.

During those days, feelings moved through the city like a storm: instant dread, anxiety, moral outrage at the injustice, then detachment. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and materials that the work demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was destroyed, the furniture lay ruined, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, working at an easel, declining to let quiet and debris have the final say.

Converting Grief

A picture spread on social media of a young poet who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her poem went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an older woman running between alleys, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some repressed remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: turning ruin into art, loss into poetry, grief into longing.

Translation as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of destruction, I found myself working on a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet persisted producing until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all longed for – 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 staying put, of enduring.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that language study become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, aspiration, discipline, anchor, and metaphor” all at once.

A Marked Legacy

And then came the photograph. I noticed it on a website and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, marked but whole, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, drained of life among the debris and ruins. 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 full weight of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, stubborn declination to vanish.