Among those Ruined Remains of an Apartment Block, I Found a Volume I’d Rendered

Among the debris of a fallen structure, a particular sight remained with me: a tome I had rendered from the English language to Farsi, lying partly concealed in dirt and ash. Its cover was torn and smudged, its sheets curled and burned, but it was still legible. Still communicating.

A Metropolis Under Assault

Two days prior, projectiles started hitting the city. There were no sirens, just abrupt, powerful detonations. The web was completely cut off. I was in my apartment, translating a work about what it means to move language across languages, and the morals and concerns of occupying a different narrative. As structures fell, I sat polishing a text that contended, in its subtle way, for the persistence of meaning.

Everything halted. A project my publisher had been about to send to press was stranded when the printing house shut down. Retailers shut one by one. One night, when the booms were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop worrying about the library in my apartment, filled with lexicons, rare editions I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Separation and Grief

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure towns – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a picture: in the distance, a industrial site was ablaze, black smoke coiling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to chase them.

During those days, moods swept through the city like a front: sudden terror, anxiety, moral outrage at the wrong, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant look-ups and references that translation demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every pane was broken, the furniture lay damaged, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an easel, declining to let silence and dust have the last word.

Translating Pain

A picture was shared on social media of a young artist who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman running between passages, yelling a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some repressed memory. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

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

The Craft 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 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 creating until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unattainable. 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 more than an art form: it was an act of perseverance, of staying put, of holding on.

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

A Marked Voice

And then came the photograph. I noticed it on a news site and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, scarred but intact, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, devoid of life among the debris and debris. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but persisting.

I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a act with consequences”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, unyielding refusal to vanish.