Amid those Devastated Debris of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Book I’d Rendered

Within the rubble of a destroyed apartment block, a solitary sight remained with me: a book I had rendered from the English language to Farsi, sitting partially covered in dust and soot. Its front was shredded and stained, its leaves bent and singed, but it was still readable. Still communicating.

An Urban Center During Attack

Two days earlier, projectiles began striking the city. There were no sirens, just unexpected, powerful explosions. The digital network was entirely severed. I was in my apartment, rendering a work about what it means to move language across languages, and the morals and concerns of taking on someone else's perspective. As edifices collapsed, I sat polishing a text that contended, in its subtle way, for the persistence of purpose.

Everything stopped. A project my publishing house had been about to send to press was stranded when the facility closed. Retailers locked their doors one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, holding reference books, rare volumes 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 endure the night.

Distance and Loss

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be safer areas – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a photo: in the distance, a plant was burning, thick smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and danger seemed to pursue them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like a front: sudden fear, anxiety, righteous anger at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick searches and references that the work demands.

Outside, shockwaves ripped windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every window was broken, the possessions lay ruined, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, painting at an easel, declining to let quiet and dust have the last word.

Transforming Sorrow

A image spread on social media of a 23-year-old poet who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman running between alleyways, shouting a name. People said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some repressed recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: turning destruction into image, death into lines, grief into search.

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself translating 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 lost his sight yet kept creating until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all longed for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than a skill: it was an act of resistance, of staying put, of enduring.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his prison cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that linguistic work become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, goal, practice, support, and metaphor” all at once.

A Marked Work

And then came the picture. I noticed it on a website and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, marked but whole, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, stripped of life among the rubble and debris. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – 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 had significance”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, unyielding rejection to vanish.