Within those Ruined Debris of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Book I’d Rendered

Within the debris of a collapsed building, a solitary vision stayed with me: a volume I had rendered from the English language to Farsi, sitting half-buried in dirt and soot. Its cover was torn and dirtied, its leaves curled and singed, but it was still readable. Still uttering words.

A Metropolis Amid Bombardment

Two days earlier, rockets started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, violent detonations. The internet was entirely severed. I was in my residence, rendering a book about what it means to move words across cultures, and the ethics and worries of occupying a different voice. As structures fell, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its quiet way, for the persistence of purpose.

Everything ceased. A book my publisher had been about to publish was stranded when the facility shut down. Shops closed 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 worrying about the shelves in my apartment, filled with lexicons, rare editions I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That library was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Distance and Grief

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be safer towns – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a picture: in the distance, a plant was burning, thick smoke curling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and threat seemed to chase them.

During those days, moods swept through the city like a storm: sudden dread, anxiety, moral outrage at the injustice, then detachment. Beyond the personal impact, the bombardment eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and sources that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces blew windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the possessions lay damaged, objects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, creating at an stand, declining to let quiet and dust have the last word.

Converting Grief

A photograph circulated digitally of a 23-year-old poet who was died when missiles struck a building. Her poem went spread rapidly alongside her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman running between passages, calling a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried memory. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: transforming devastation into image, death into poetry, grief into longing.

The Craft as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself rendering a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted creating until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond a skill: it was an act of defiance, of remaining, of persisting.

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

A Scarred Voice

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

I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else crumbles. It is a subtle, determined refusal to vanish.