Among those Devastated Debris of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Book I’d Rendered

Among the wreckage of a collapsed building, a solitary image remained with me: a volume I had rendered from the English language to Farsi, resting partially covered in dirt and soot. Its jacket was torn and stained, its leaves bent and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking.

An Urban Center Amid Assault

Two days earlier, projectiles began striking the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, violent blasts. The digital network was totally disconnected. I was in my residence, rendering a work about what it means to transport words across cultures, and the principles and worries of taking on a different voice. As edifices collapsed, I sat revising a text that argued, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of significance.

Everything halted. A manuscript my publisher had been about to publish was stuck when the printer shut down. Bookstores locked their doors one by one. One night, when the explosions were too nearby, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the bookshelves in my apartment, stocked with reference books, rare editions I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That library was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Dispersal and Devastation

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous towns – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a photo: in the background, a factory was ablaze, thick smoke spiraling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like weather: swift fear, anxiety, moral outrage at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the personal impact, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick look-ups and references that translation demands.

Outside, blast waves blew windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every pane was shattered, the furniture lay ruined, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, creating at an easel, choosing not to let silence and debris have the last word.

Converting Sorrow

A photograph circulated on social media of a young writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her poem went was widely shared next to her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an elderly woman running between alleys, yelling a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried recollection. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: transforming ruin into image, death into lines, grief into quest.

The Work as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of devastation, I found myself rendering a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will get better 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 continued creating until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all longed for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than literary craft: it was an act of defiance, of remaining, of enduring.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his prison cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that language study become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, goal, practice, support, and analogy” all at once.

An Enduring Work

And then came the photograph. I noticed it on a news site and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, scarred but surviving, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, drained 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 apparent – 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 mattered”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, stubborn refusal to be silenced.