Amid the Ruined Remains of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Book I Had Translated

Within the wreckage of a fallen structure, a single sight stayed with me: a volume I had translated from English to Farsi, lying half-buried in dirt and soot. Its jacket was shredded and stained, its leaves bent and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating.

A City During Bombardment

Two days before, missiles commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just sudden, forceful detonations. The digital network was totally cut off. I was in my apartment, translating a work about what it means to carry text across tongues, and the morals and anxieties of taking on another’s voice. As edifices fell, I sat revising a text that argued, in its quiet way, for the persistence of meaning.

Everything stopped. A book my publisher had been about to send to press was halted when the printer ceased operations. Retailers locked their doors one by one. One night, when the blasts were too nearby, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop thinking about the library in my apartment, filled with dictionaries, hard-to-find books I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That library was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Separation and Loss

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous locations – 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 factory was burning, thick smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to follow them.

During those days, feelings moved through the city like weather: sudden terror, anxiety, righteous anger at the injustice, then detachment. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick look-ups and references that the work demands.

Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their casings; at a relative's house, every window was broken, the furniture lay broken, objects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, painting at an stand, choosing not to let silence and dust have the final say.

Transforming Pain

A image circulated digitally of a young artist who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an older woman dashing between alleyways, yelling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some buried remembrance. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: transforming destruction into image, death into poetry, grief into search.

The Work as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst devastation, I found myself rendering a fable about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet persisted creating until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all yearned for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond an art form: it was an act of defiance, of staying put, of enduring.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his confinement, asking for more resources, insisting that language study become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, aspiration, rigor, foundation, and symbol” all at once.

A Scarred Voice

And then came the image. I saw it on a platform and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, marked but surviving, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, devoid 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 surviving.

I stared at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a act with consequences”, 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 erased. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, unyielding refusal to be silenced.