Amid the Devastated Debris of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Book I’d Translated

Within the debris of a collapsed structure, a single vision remained with me: a tome I had rendered from English to Persian, sitting partly concealed in dust and ash. Its front was ripped and stained, its pages bent and scorched, but it was still decipherable. Still uttering words.

A City During Attack

Two days prior, rockets began striking the city. There were no alarms, just sudden, powerful blasts. The digital network was totally disconnected. I was in my residence, translating a work about what it means to carry words across languages, and the ethics and anxieties of occupying another’s voice. As buildings fell, I sat polishing a text that argued, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of significance.

Everything halted. A project my publisher had been about to send to press was stranded when the printing house shut down. Bookstores locked their doors one by one. One night, when the booms were too nearby, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop worrying about the bookshelves in my apartment, filled with dictionaries, hard-to-find books I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Separation and Devastation

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure locations – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a photo: in the faraway, a factory was ablaze, black smoke curling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and danger seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions moved through the city like weather: sudden fear, unease, righteous anger at the unfairness, then numbness. Beyond the emotional toll, the attack eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and sources that translation demands.

Outside, blast waves ripped windows from their sashes; at a relative's house, every window was broken, the belongings lay damaged, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an stand, refusing to let quiet and dust have the final say.

Translating Grief

A photograph was shared online of a young artist who was died when missiles struck a building. Her poem went was widely shared next to her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an elderly woman dashing between alleys, yelling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some buried recollection. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: transforming destruction into image, demise into poetry, mourning 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 recover 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 continued working until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all desired – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth striving for.

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

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

A Scarred Voice

And then came the image. I spotted it on a platform and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, damaged but whole, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, devoid of life among the rubble and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but enduring.

I looked 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 erased. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else disappears. It is a subtle, unyielding rejection to be silenced.