Amid the Ruined Debris of an Apartment Block, I Found a Volume I’d Rendered

Among the wreckage of a fallen apartment block, a solitary image remained with me: a volume I had converted from English to Farsi, lying partially covered in dust and ash. Its front was torn and dirtied, its pages curled and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating.

A City During Bombardment

Two days prior, missiles began striking the city. There were no sirens, just abrupt, violent blasts. The digital network was totally cut off. I was in my flat, working on a text about what it means to transport text across languages, and the principles and concerns of inhabiting another’s perspective. As structures came down, I sat revising a text that suggested, in its subtle way, for the persistence of meaning.

Everything halted. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to go to print was stranded when the printer shut down. Retailers locked their doors one by one. One night, when the booms were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the library in my apartment, stocked with reference books, rare books I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Separation and Grief

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure towns – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the background, a plant was burning, dark smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to chase them.

During those days, moods moved through the city like weather: sudden terror, apprehension, righteous anger at the injustice, then detachment. Beyond the personal impact, the bombardment destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant look-ups and sources that the work demands.

Outside, concussive forces blew windows from their sashes; at a relative's house, every window was broken, the furniture lay broken, objects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, painting at an stand, declining to let stillness and dirt have the ultimate victory.

Converting Grief

A picture spread on social media of a 23-year-old poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared with her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an elderly woman running between alleys, shouting a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some deep-seated memory. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

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

The Craft as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself working on a story for young readers 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 lost his sight yet kept working until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all longed for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than a skill: it was an act of resistance, of holding one's ground, of persisting.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his prison cell, asking for more resources, 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.

An Enduring Legacy

And then came the image. I spotted it on a platform and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, damaged but surviving, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, stripped of life among the debris and ruins. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but enduring.

I stared 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 fire, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, unyielding refusal to vanish.