Among those Devastated Debris of an Apartment Block, I Found a Book I Had Rendered

Within the rubble of a destroyed structure, a solitary sight remained with me: a book I had translated from the English language to Farsi, lying half-buried in dirt and soot. Its cover was ripped and stained, its sheets curled and scorched, but it was still readable. Still uttering words.

An Urban Center During Assault

Two days before, missiles started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, powerful detonations. The internet was completely cut off. I was in my residence, rendering a text about what it means to transport language across tongues, and the ethics and worries of inhabiting a different perspective. As buildings collapsed, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its subtle way, for the endurance of purpose.

Everything halted. A project my publishing house had been about to send to press was stranded when the printer closed. Shops locked their doors 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 dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, filled with lexicons, rare books I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Distance and Devastation

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous locations – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a plant was burning, black smoke coiling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to chase them.

During those days, emotions moved through the city like a front: sudden fear, unease, moral outrage at the injustice, then apathy. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and sources that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces blew windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every window was destroyed, the furniture lay ruined, objects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an stand, declining to let stillness and dust have the final say.

Translating Sorrow

A picture was shared digitally of a 23-year-old artist who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her writing went was widely shared with her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an older woman hurrying between alleyways, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some buried remembrance. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: transforming destruction into picture, death into verse, sorrow into search.

The Work as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of destruction, 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 profound 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 aiming at the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward.

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

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that translation become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, goal, rigor, support, and symbol” all at once.

An Enduring Voice

And then came the photograph. I spotted it on a website and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, scarred but surviving, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, stripped of life among the rubble and ruins. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but enduring.

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 fire, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else disappears. It is a subtle, determined declination to vanish.