Among those Devastated Debris of an Apartment Block, I Found a Book I Had Rendered
Within the debris of a collapsed apartment block, a single vision stayed with me: a tome I had rendered from English to Persian, lying partially covered in dirt and soot. Its front was shredded and smudged, its sheets bent and burned, but it was still readable. Still communicating.
A City Amid Assault
Two days before, projectiles began striking the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, forceful detonations. The digital network was completely disconnected. I was in my apartment, translating a work about what it means to move words across tongues, and the ethics and anxieties of inhabiting someone else's narrative. As buildings fell, I sat editing a text that argued, in its understated way, for the persistence of purpose.
Everything stopped. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to go to print was halted when the facility ceased operations. Retailers closed one by one. One night, when the booms were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the library in my apartment, filled with dictionaries, hard-to-find volumes I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.
Distance and Devastation
My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous towns – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the distance, a factory was ablaze, black smoke coiling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to pursue them.
During those days, feelings moved through the city like a front: instant fear, apprehension, moral outrage at the unfairness, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick searches and references that the craft demands.
Outside, concussive forces ripped windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every pane was destroyed, the furniture lay ruined, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, painting at an stand, choosing not to let stillness and dust have the final say.
Transforming Grief
A picture was shared digitally of a young poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her poem went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an elderly woman hurrying between passages, yelling a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some deep-seated recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home.
We were all transforming, in our own way: changing devastation into picture, death into poetry, grief into search.
Translation as Defiance
A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself rendering a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet kept working until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all desired – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth striving for.
During those nights, I understood translation as something more than an art form: it was an act of perseverance, of staying put, of enduring.
One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his cell, asking for more books, insisting that linguistic work become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, goal, practice, anchor, and symbol” all at once.
An Enduring Legacy
And then came the photograph. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, damaged but intact, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, stripped of life among the debris and debris. For most of my career, I had been invisible, 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 statement”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else crumbles. It is a subtle, unyielding refusal to disappear.
