Among those Devastated Debris of an Apartment Block, I Found a Book I’d Translated

Within the wreckage of a collapsed structure, a single sight stayed with me: a book I had translated from English to Persian, resting half-buried in dust and soot. Its jacket was torn and stained, its sheets bent and scorched, but it was still readable. Still speaking.

A Metropolis Amid Bombardment

Two days earlier, missiles began striking the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, violent blasts. The digital network was entirely disconnected. I was in my residence, working on a work about what it means to carry language across languages, and the morals and concerns of inhabiting a different narrative. As structures fell, I sat revising a text that suggested, in its subtle way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything stopped. A project my publishing house had been about to go to print was stuck when the printer closed. Retailers shut one by one. One night, when the booms were too imminent, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, filled with reference books, hard-to-find volumes I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Distance and Grief

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be safer towns – 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 picture: in the faraway, a plant was ablaze, thick smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly somewhere else, and peril seemed to chase them.

During those days, feelings swept through the city like a front: sudden terror, unease, moral outrage at the unfairness, then numbness. Beyond the emotional toll, the attack eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant look-ups and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, shockwaves ripped windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the furniture lay damaged, personal effects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an stand, refusing to let silence and dirt have the last word.

Converting Sorrow

A picture circulated online of a 23-year-old writer who was killed 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 older woman running between alleyways, calling a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some deep-seated recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: turning ruin into picture, death into poetry, mourning into quest.

The Craft as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of destruction, I found myself translating a fable about a king whose daughter will get better 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 continued creating until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all yearned for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than an art form: it was an act of perseverance, of remaining, of enduring.

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

A Scarred Work

And then came the image. I saw it on a news site and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, scarred but whole, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been black and white, stripped 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 visible – scarred, but enduring.

I stared at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else crumbles. It is a subtle, determined declination to disappear.