Amid the Devastated Debris of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Book I Had Translated

Within the wreckage of a destroyed building, a solitary sight remained with me: a book I had rendered from English to Farsi, resting partly concealed in dust and ash. Its jacket was shredded and dirtied, its leaves bent and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating.

A City Amid Bombardment

Two days prior, rockets began striking the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, violent explosions. The digital network was entirely disconnected. I was in my apartment, rendering a book about what it means to move language across cultures, and the principles and worries of taking on someone else's perspective. As edifices collapsed, I sat revising a text that contended, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything stopped. A book my publishing house had been about to send to press was stranded when the printing house ceased operations. Shops shut one by one. One night, when the explosions were too nearby, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop worrying about the library in my apartment, stocked with lexicons, valuable volumes I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Dispersal and Devastation

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous areas – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a picture: in the background, a factory was on fire, thick smoke coiling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and threat seemed to chase them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like a front: sudden terror, unease, indignation at the unfairness, then numbness. Beyond the emotional toll, the attack eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick look-ups and sources that translation demands.

Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their casings; at a family member's house, every window was shattered, the belongings lay broken, household items scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, painting at an easel, refusing to let quiet and dirt have the last word.

Transforming Sorrow

A photograph spread online of a young artist who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her writing went spread rapidly next to her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an older woman running between alleyways, shouting a name. People said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some deep-seated recollection. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: transforming devastation into picture, loss into poetry, mourning into search.

The Craft as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by ruin, I found myself working on a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will recover 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 striving for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond literary craft: it was an act of perseverance, of staying put, of enduring.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his 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, foundation, and symbol” all at once.

An Enduring Work

And then came the picture. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, scarred but surviving, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, drained of life among the debris and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but persisting.

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 complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, stubborn declination to disappear.