Among those Ruined Remains of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Book I’d Translated

Within the wreckage of a collapsed building, a particular sight stayed with me: a book I had translated from English to Farsi, resting half-buried in dirt and soot. Its front was shredded and dirtied, its sheets bent and burned, but it was still legible. Still speaking.

A City Under Bombardment

Two days before, projectiles started hitting the city. There were no sirens, just sudden, violent explosions. The internet was completely disconnected. I was in my residence, translating a text about what it means to move text across languages, and the principles and anxieties of taking on another’s perspective. As buildings collapsed, I sat editing a text that contended, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything stopped. A book my publishing house had been about to go to print was stuck when the facility ceased operations. Retailers shut one by one. One night, when the booms were too close, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, stocked with lexicons, rare books 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 survive the night.

Separation and Loss

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous areas – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a industrial site was burning, dark smoke coiling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and threat seemed to chase them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like a front: sudden dread, anxiety, indignation at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the psychological cost, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick look-ups and materials that translation demands.

Outside, blast waves tore windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the belongings lay broken, objects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an easel, refusing to let quiet and debris have the final say.

Converting Sorrow

A picture spread on social media of a 23-year-old poet who was died when missiles struck a building. Her poem went spread rapidly next to her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an older 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 deep-seated remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: turning ruin into image, demise into verse, grief into longing.

The Craft as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of ruin, I found myself working on a fable about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound 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 unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all yearned for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth striving for.

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

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his cell, asking for more books, insisting that language study become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, aspiration, discipline, foundation, and symbol” all at once.

A Scarred Work

And then came the image. I saw it on a news site and saw that, within 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 wreckage. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but surviving.

I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a political act”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else disappears. It is a persistent, unyielding refusal to be silenced.