Amid those Devastated Remains of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Book I Had Rendered

Within the rubble of a collapsed structure, a solitary image stayed with me: a book I had converted from the English language to Farsi, lying partly concealed in dirt and ash. Its jacket was torn and dirtied, its pages curled and scorched, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking.

An Urban Center During Assault

Two days before, missiles started hitting the city. There were no sirens, just abrupt, forceful detonations. The web was totally severed. I was in my apartment, rendering a text about what it means to move language across cultures, and the ethics and worries of occupying someone else's perspective. As buildings fell, I sat polishing a text that argued, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publisher had been about to send to press was stuck when the printer shut down. Retailers locked their doors one by one. One night, when the booms were too close, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the bookshelves in my apartment, holding lexicons, hard-to-find editions I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Separation and Loss

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous areas – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a photo: in the distance, a factory was burning, thick smoke spiraling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods passed over the city like a storm: instant terror, unease, moral outrage at the injustice, then detachment. Beyond the personal impact, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the belongings lay damaged, personal effects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, creating at an stand, declining to let stillness and dust have the last word.

Translating Pain

A image was shared online of a 23-year-old writer who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went viral alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an elderly woman hurrying between alleys, yelling a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some repressed remembrance. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: transforming devastation into image, demise into lines, grief into longing.

The Craft as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of ruin, I found myself translating a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted producing until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all desired – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth reaching toward.

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

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his prison cell, asking for more books, insisting that language study become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, aspiration, practice, anchor, and analogy” all at once.

A Marked Work

And then came the photograph. I saw it on a platform and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, damaged but surviving, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been black and white, drained of life among the rubble and ruins. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but enduring.

I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a act with consequences”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else falls away. It is a quiet, stubborn refusal to disappear.