Amid those Devastated Remains of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Book I’d Rendered

Among the rubble of a collapsed building, a solitary vision remained with me: a volume I had rendered from the English language to Farsi, sitting partially covered in dust and ash. Its jacket was shredded and stained, its leaves bent and scorched, but it was still legible. Still speaking.

A City During Attack

Two days earlier, projectiles started hitting the city. There were no sirens, just sudden, powerful blasts. The web was completely severed. I was in my flat, working on a work about what it means to transport language across tongues, and the morals and anxieties of occupying someone else's voice. As structures collapsed, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its quiet way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything halted. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to send to press was halted when the printer closed. Retailers closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too nearby, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop thinking about the shelves in my apartment, holding lexicons, rare editions I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That library was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Separation and Grief

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be safer locations – 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 picture: in the distance, a plant was on fire, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like a storm: sudden fear, unease, moral outrage at the unfairness, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate searches and references that translation demands.

Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every pane was broken, the possessions lay broken, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, working at an easel, refusing to let stillness and debris have the ultimate victory.

Translating Grief

A photograph was shared digitally of a 23-year-old poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral alongside her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an elderly woman running between alleys, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some buried memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

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

The Work as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of ruin, I found myself translating a fable 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 impossible, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond literary craft: it was an act of perseverance, of staying put, of holding on.

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

A Marked Legacy

And then came the picture. I spotted it on a platform and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, scarred 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 rubble and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but persisting.

I looked at 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 fire, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else falls away. It is a subtle, unyielding declination to disappear.