Amid those Ruined Debris of an Apartment Block, I Found a Volume I’d Translated

Within the debris of a fallen apartment block, a single sight lingered with me: a tome I had rendered from English to Farsi, lying partially covered in dirt and soot. Its cover was ripped and smudged, its leaves bent and singed, but it was still legible. Still communicating.

An Urban Center Under Assault

Two days earlier, projectiles started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, violent blasts. The internet was entirely severed. I was in my flat, working on a book about what it means to move text across tongues, and the principles and concerns of taking on a different voice. As structures collapsed, I sat revising a text that suggested, in its quiet way, for the persistence of significance.

Everything stopped. A project my publishing house had been about to send to press was halted when the facility ceased operations. Shops shut one by one. One night, when the booms were too close, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the bookshelves in my apartment, stocked with reference books, hard-to-find books I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Distance and Loss

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure locations – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a image: in the background, a industrial site was on fire, thick smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, emotions passed over the city like weather: swift terror, unease, righteous anger at the wrong, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate queries and materials that the work demands.

Outside, shockwaves ripped windows from their sashes; at a family member's house, every pane was broken, the possessions lay ruined, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, creating at an easel, choosing not to let quiet and dirt have the ultimate victory.

Translating Pain

A picture was shared on social media of a 23-year-old artist who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her writing went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an elderly woman dashing between alleys, calling a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some repressed remembrance. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: changing ruin into image, demise into poetry, grief into search.

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself translating a story for young readers 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 persisted producing until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all longed for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth reaching toward.

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

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his cell, asking for more books, insisting that linguistic work become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, hope, rigor, foundation, and analogy” all at once.

An Enduring Work

And then came the picture. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, damaged but intact, my name printed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, stripped of life among the concrete and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, 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 attack, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else falls away. It is a quiet, determined refusal to disappear.