Within the Ruined Debris of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Book I’d Rendered

Among the wreckage of a collapsed building, a single image remained with me: a book I had rendered from the English language to Persian, sitting partly concealed in dust and ash. Its front was shredded and stained, its pages bent and burned, but it was still readable. Still speaking.

A Metropolis Amid Attack

Two days before, projectiles started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, violent blasts. The internet was entirely cut off. I was in my flat, translating a text about what it means to move words across cultures, and the ethics and concerns of taking on someone else's voice. As structures fell, I sat revising a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the persistence of significance.

Everything halted. A manuscript my publisher had been about to publish was stranded when the printer shut down. Bookstores shut one by one. One night, when the explosions were too close, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the bookshelves in my apartment, holding dictionaries, valuable editions I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That library was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Distance and Loss

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be safer 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 photo: in the faraway, a plant was ablaze, black smoke coiling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and danger seemed to chase them.

During those days, moods passed over the city like a front: instant terror, anxiety, indignation at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant look-ups and materials that the work demands.

Outside, concussive forces blew windows from their sashes; at a family member's house, every pane was destroyed, the furniture lay damaged, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, creating at an easel, declining to let stillness and debris have the last word.

Transforming Sorrow

A image spread digitally of a young writer who was died when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman hurrying between alleys, yelling a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried remembrance. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: transforming devastation into art, demise into verse, grief into longing.

The Craft as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of ruin, I found myself rendering a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will get better 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 producing until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all longed for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond an art form: it was an act of resistance, of holding one's ground, of persisting.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his prison cell, asking for more books, insisting that language study become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, goal, discipline, foundation, and metaphor” all at once.

A Scarred Legacy

And then came the picture. I noticed it on a news site and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, damaged but surviving, my name printed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, stripped of life among the concrete and debris. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but surviving.

I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a act with consequences”, but I had never felt the full weight 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 transport stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else disappears. It is a subtle, unyielding rejection to disappear.