Among the Ruined Remains of an Apartment Block, I Found a Book I Had Rendered

Within the debris of a fallen building, a particular image remained with me: a tome I had converted from English to Farsi, resting half-buried in dirt and ash. Its front was ripped and dirtied, its leaves bent and scorched, but it was still legible. Still uttering words.

A City During Assault

Two days before, rockets started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, forceful explosions. The internet was totally cut off. I was in my apartment, translating a work about what it means to carry words across languages, and the morals and worries of taking on a different perspective. As buildings came down, I sat polishing a text that contended, in its quiet way, for the endurance of meaning.

Everything halted. A book my publisher had been about to publish was stranded when the facility closed. Retailers closed one by one. One night, when the explosions were too close, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, stocked with reference books, rare volumes I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Dispersal and Devastation

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure locations – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a picture: in the faraway, a factory was burning, dark smoke spiraling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to pursue them.

During those days, feelings swept through the city like a storm: instant dread, anxiety, righteous anger at the wrong, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the attack eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick look-ups and references that the work demands.

Outside, blast waves blew windows from their sashes; at a relative's house, every pane was shattered, the belongings lay ruined, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, painting at an easel, choosing not to let stillness and dust have the ultimate victory.

Translating Grief

A picture circulated online of a 23-year-old artist who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her poem went viral alongside her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an elderly woman running between alleyways, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some buried remembrance. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: turning destruction into art, loss into verse, grief into search.

The Craft as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself working on a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted working until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all desired – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond literary craft: it was an act of defiance, of remaining, of enduring.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his confinement, asking for more resources, insisting that translation become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, goal, discipline, anchor, and metaphor” all at once.

A Marked Voice

And then came the photograph. I spotted it on a website and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, damaged but surviving, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, devoid of life among the concrete and debris. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but surviving.

I gazed upon 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 fire, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a subtle, unyielding rejection to be silenced.