Among those Ruined Remains of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Book I Had Translated

Among the rubble of a collapsed apartment block, a particular image lingered with me: a book I had rendered from the English language to Farsi, sitting partially covered in dirt and soot. Its jacket was ripped and smudged, its leaves bent and scorched, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating.

A City Amid Bombardment

Two days earlier, projectiles started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, forceful explosions. The digital network was completely cut off. I was in my flat, working on a text about what it means to carry words across cultures, and the morals and worries of inhabiting someone else's voice. As buildings collapsed, I sat revising a text that contended, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything halted. A book my publishing house had been about to go to print was halted when the printer shut down. Retailers closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, filled with reference books, hard-to-find editions I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That library was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Separation and Loss

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be safer towns – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a industrial site was ablaze, thick smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly far away, and threat seemed to pursue them.

During those days, emotions moved through the city like a front: swift fear, apprehension, moral outrage at the unfairness, then detachment. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick searches and references that the work demands.

Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their sashes; at a family member's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the furniture lay broken, objects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, painting at an stand, choosing not to let quiet and dust have the ultimate victory.

Converting Grief

A photograph spread on social media of a 23-year-old 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, calling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some buried recollection. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: turning ruin into art, loss into verse, mourning into quest.

The Work as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst destruction, I found myself translating a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet kept producing until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all longed for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond an art form: it was an act of perseverance, of holding one's ground, of holding on.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that linguistic work become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, aspiration, practice, anchor, and symbol” all at once.

A Scarred Legacy

And then came the photograph. I noticed it on a website and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, marked but surviving, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, devoid of life among the concrete and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but persisting.

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 was important”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, determined rejection to vanish.