Within those Devastated Remains of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Book I’d Rendered

In the wreckage of a destroyed structure, a single image lingered with me: a volume I had translated from English to Farsi, lying partially covered in dirt and soot. Its front was shredded and smudged, its pages curled and scorched, but it was still readable. Still uttering words.

A Metropolis Under Attack

Two days before, projectiles began striking the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, powerful blasts. The web was entirely disconnected. I was in my residence, rendering a book about what it means to transport text across tongues, and the ethics and anxieties of inhabiting a different narrative. As structures came down, I sat editing a text that contended, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything halted. A project my publisher had been about to send to press was halted when the facility closed. Retailers locked their doors one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the library in my apartment, filled with reference books, hard-to-find volumes I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That collection 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 locations – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a picture: in the faraway, a industrial site was ablaze, dark smoke spiraling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and danger seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods moved through the city like a front: swift terror, unease, righteous anger at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick searches and materials that translation demands.

Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their casings; at a relative's house, every window was shattered, the possessions lay broken, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an stand, declining to let silence and dust have the final say.

Transforming Grief

A image circulated on social media of a 23-year-old artist 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 elderly woman running between alleyways, yelling a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some deep-seated recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: changing devastation into art, loss into lines, mourning into quest.

The Craft as Defiance

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

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond a skill: it was an act of perseverance, of holding one's ground, of enduring.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his prison cell, asking for more resources, insisting that linguistic work become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, aspiration, practice, support, and symbol” all at once.

A Marked Work

And then came the image. I spotted it on a platform and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, damaged but surviving, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, devoid of life among the debris and ruins. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, 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 political act”, but I had never felt the full weight of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else disappears. It is a persistent, stubborn rejection to disappear.