Amid the Devastated Debris of an Apartment Block, I Found a Volume I Had Rendered

Among the rubble of a collapsed apartment block, a particular image remained with me: a book I had rendered from English to Farsi, resting half-buried in dirt and ash. Its jacket was shredded and dirtied, its leaves curled and scorched, but it was still legible. Still communicating.

A City Amid Attack

Two days earlier, rockets began striking the city. There were no alarms, just sudden, forceful blasts. The web was completely severed. I was in my apartment, rendering a text about what it means to carry words across cultures, and the ethics and worries of taking on a different perspective. As edifices fell, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything ceased. A book my publisher had been about to publish was halted when the printing house ceased operations. Retailers closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the library in my apartment, holding lexicons, hard-to-find volumes I had spent years gathering 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 make it through the night.

Distance and Loss

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous locations – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a photo: in the faraway, a industrial site was on fire, dark smoke coiling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to pursue them.

During those days, feelings swept through the city like a front: sudden terror, anxiety, moral outrage at the injustice, then detachment. Beyond the emotional toll, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and sources that the craft demands.

Outside, blast waves tore windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every window was broken, the belongings lay damaged, objects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, painting at an easel, choosing not to let silence and dust have the last word.

Translating Grief

A picture spread digitally of a young artist who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her writing went spread rapidly alongside her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an older woman hurrying between passages, yelling a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: changing devastation into art, demise into verse, grief into quest.

The Craft as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst destruction, I found myself working on a fable about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet kept working until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all yearned for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than literary craft: it was an act of defiance, of staying put, of holding on.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his prison cell, asking for more resources, insisting that linguistic work become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, aspiration, discipline, support, and analogy” all at once.

An Enduring Work

And then came the picture. I saw it on a platform and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, marked 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 debris. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, 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 full weight of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else falls away. It is a quiet, determined refusal to disappear.