Amid those Devastated Remains of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Book I Had Rendered

Within the debris of a destroyed apartment block, a single sight stayed with me: a book I had converted from the English language to Farsi, lying partially covered in dirt and soot. Its jacket was shredded and smudged, its sheets curled and scorched, but it was still legible. Still uttering words.

A City Amid Attack

Two days before, rockets commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, powerful explosions. The web was completely disconnected. I was in my residence, working on a text about what it means to carry text across tongues, and the morals and worries of occupying someone else's narrative. As edifices collapsed, I sat revising a text that argued, in its quiet way, for the persistence of purpose.

Everything stopped. A book my publishing house had been about to send to press was stranded when the printing house shut down. Bookstores locked their doors one by one. One night, when the booms were too close, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, filled with lexicons, valuable volumes I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Dispersal and Devastation

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure areas – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a photo: in the faraway, a factory was burning, thick smoke coiling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly somewhere else, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods passed over the city like a storm: swift dread, anxiety, indignation at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick searches and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, blast waves ripped windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every window was destroyed, the possessions lay broken, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, creating at an easel, declining to let quiet and dust have the last word.

Converting Pain

A image circulated online of a young writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an elderly woman running between alleyways, shouting a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some deep-seated memory. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: turning destruction into picture, loss into poetry, sorrow into search.

The Work as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst ruin, I found myself rendering a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet continued producing 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 unattainable, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than literary craft: it was an act of perseverance, of holding one's ground, of holding on.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his cell, asking for more books, insisting that translation become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, aspiration, rigor, support, and symbol” all at once.

A Scarred Voice

And then came the picture. 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 intact, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been black and white, devoid 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 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 attack, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, determined rejection to disappear.