Among the Ruined Remains of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Volume I’d Rendered

Within the rubble of a collapsed building, a particular vision remained with me: a volume I had converted from English to Farsi, sitting half-buried in dust and ash. Its front was shredded and smudged, its leaves curled and scorched, but it was still readable. Still uttering words.

A City During Attack

Two days before, missiles started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, violent blasts. The web was entirely cut off. I was in my residence, working on a work about what it means to transport text across cultures, and the morals and worries of occupying someone else's perspective. As edifices came down, I sat polishing a text that argued, in its subtle way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to go to print was stuck when the printer shut down. Bookstores closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, rare editions I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Separation and Devastation

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure areas – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a photo: in the distance, a plant was burning, black smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to chase them.

During those days, moods swept through the city like a storm: swift dread, anxiety, moral outrage at the injustice, then apathy. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and sources that translation demands.

Outside, shockwaves ripped windows from their sashes; at a family member's house, every window was broken, the furniture lay damaged, objects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, painting at an stand, declining to let quiet and dust have the ultimate victory.

Converting Grief

A image circulated online of a young artist who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her poem went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an older woman running between alleys, yelling a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some repressed recollection. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: changing ruin into picture, loss into poetry, mourning into longing.

The Work as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of devastation, I found myself rendering a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet persisted producing until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all desired – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond a skill: it was an act of resistance, of staying put, of holding on.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his confinement, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that translation become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, aspiration, discipline, support, and analogy” all at once.

An Enduring Legacy

And then came the photograph. I noticed it on a website and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, marked but surviving, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, devoid of life among the debris and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but surviving.

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