Among those Ruined Remains of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Book I Had Translated

In the debris of a collapsed building, a particular vision stayed with me: a tome I had converted from English to Persian, resting half-buried in dirt and soot. Its front was torn and smudged, its leaves curled and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking.

A Metropolis Amid Attack

Two days prior, rockets commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, forceful blasts. The internet was completely cut off. I was in my apartment, working on a work about what it means to carry text across tongues, and the ethics and concerns of inhabiting a different narrative. As buildings fell, I sat editing a text that argued, in its understated way, for the endurance of purpose.

Everything stopped. A book my publisher had been about to publish was stuck when the printing house closed. Bookstores shut one by one. One night, when the explosions were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the library in my apartment, stocked with lexicons, rare volumes I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Separation and Grief

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous towns – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a picture: in the background, a industrial site was ablaze, dark smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, feelings swept through the city like a storm: instant terror, apprehension, righteous anger at the injustice, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, blast waves tore windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every pane was shattered, the belongings lay damaged, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an stand, declining to let silence and dirt have the last word.

Transforming Grief

A photograph spread online of a 23-year-old artist who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared with her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an elderly woman running between passages, calling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some repressed memory. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: transforming ruin into picture, death into lines, sorrow into longing.

The Work 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 significant meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of 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 yearned for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond literary craft: it was an act of resistance, of staying put, 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 language study become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, aspiration, practice, anchor, and symbol” all at once.

A Marked Work

And then came the picture. I saw it on a news site and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, damaged but intact, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been devoid of color, drained of life among the concrete and ruins. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but enduring.

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 attack, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else disappears. It is a subtle, stubborn refusal to vanish.