Among the Ruined Debris of an Apartment Block, I Found a Volume I Had Translated

In the debris of a destroyed apartment block, a particular sight lingered with me: a tome I had translated from English to Farsi, sitting half-buried in dust and soot. Its cover was ripped and stained, its leaves curled and scorched, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking.

An Urban Center During Bombardment

Two days before, projectiles began striking the city. There were no sirens, just sudden, powerful detonations. The web was entirely disconnected. I was in my apartment, translating a work about what it means to move text across languages, and the morals and concerns of inhabiting another’s perspective. As buildings fell, I sat revising a text that argued, in its subtle way, for the endurance of meaning.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publisher had been about to publish was stranded when the printing house closed. Bookstores locked their doors one by one. One night, when the blasts were too nearby, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop thinking about the bookshelves in my apartment, stocked with reference books, rare books I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That library 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 more secure towns – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a plant was on fire, black smoke curling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to follow them.

During those days, feelings swept through the city like a front: swift terror, anxiety, moral outrage at the injustice, then apathy. Beyond the personal impact, the bombardment destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate queries and sources that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces ripped windows from their sashes; at a relative's house, every window was destroyed, the possessions lay damaged, objects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an stand, choosing not to let silence and debris have the ultimate victory.

Converting Sorrow

A picture circulated digitally of a 23-year-old artist who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared next to her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an elderly woman hurrying between alleyways, shouting a name. People said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some repressed memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: changing devastation into picture, loss into poetry, grief into quest.

Translation as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst destruction, I found myself working on a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant 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 reaching for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all yearned for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth pursuing.

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

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his confinement, asking for more resources, insisting that translation become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, goal, practice, support, and metaphor” all at once.

A Scarred Voice

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, damaged but whole, 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 ruins. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but persisting.

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 complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else falls away. It is a subtle, stubborn rejection to disappear.