Among the Ruined Debris of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Book I Had Translated

Among the rubble of a destroyed structure, a single vision lingered with me: a volume I had converted from the English language to Persian, sitting partially covered in dirt and soot. Its jacket was shredded and dirtied, its leaves bent and singed, but it was still legible. Still communicating.

A City During Assault

Two days before, projectiles began striking the city. There were no warnings, just sudden, forceful explosions. The digital network was entirely disconnected. I was in my residence, rendering a work about what it means to move words across tongues, and the principles and concerns of occupying another’s perspective. As structures collapsed, I sat editing a text that suggested, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of significance.

Everything halted. A book my publishing house had been about to go to print was stuck when the printing house closed. Bookstores shut one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the library in my apartment, filled with reference books, rare books I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Dispersal and Loss

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous locations – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a image: in the distance, a industrial site was ablaze, dark smoke spiraling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly somewhere else, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, feelings swept through the city like a storm: sudden terror, unease, righteous anger at the wrong, then detachment. Beyond the emotional toll, the attack eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick queries and materials that translation demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their frames; at a relative's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the furniture lay broken, objects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, painting at an easel, choosing not to let silence and debris have the final say.

Converting Grief

A picture circulated on social media of a 23-year-old artist who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her poem went viral alongside her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an elderly woman dashing between alleys, shouting a name. People said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some buried memory. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: changing destruction into image, death into poetry, grief into quest.

Translation as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst destruction, I found myself rendering 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 continued creating until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all longed for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than literary craft: it was an act of resistance, 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 philosopher in his prison cell, asking for more resources, insisting that translation become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, hope, practice, anchor, and analogy” all at once.

An Enduring Voice

And then came the photograph. I saw it on a news site and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, damaged but whole, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, stripped of life among the concrete and debris. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but enduring.

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 full weight of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, stubborn rejection to vanish.