Within those Ruined Remains of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Volume I Had Rendered

Among the rubble of a fallen building, a solitary vision stayed with me: a book I had rendered from English to Farsi, sitting half-buried in dust and ash. Its jacket was torn and dirtied, its pages curled and burned, but it was still readable. Still speaking.

A City During Attack

Two days before, missiles began striking the city. There were no sirens, just unexpected, violent detonations. The digital network was completely cut off. I was in my residence, rendering a book about what it means to move words across cultures, and the principles and concerns of inhabiting another’s perspective. As edifices came down, I sat polishing a text that argued, in its quiet way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything ceased. A project my publishing house had been about to go to print was stranded when the printer ceased operations. Retailers shut one by one. One night, when the explosions were too nearby, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, filled with reference books, rare volumes I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Separation and Loss

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be safer areas – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a picture: in the background, a plant was ablaze, black smoke coiling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to follow them.

During those days, feelings moved through the city like weather: swift fear, unease, righteous anger at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the personal impact, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick queries and materials that translation demands.

Outside, blast waves blew windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every window was shattered, the belongings lay broken, household items scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an easel, choosing not to let stillness and debris have the ultimate victory.

Translating Pain

A photograph circulated online of a 23-year-old artist who was died 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 aged woman running between alleyways, calling a name. People said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some deep-seated memory. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: turning ruin into art, loss into lines, mourning into longing.

Translation as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still amidst devastation, I found myself rendering a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet kept creating until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all yearned for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond an art form: it was an act of defiance, of staying put, of persisting.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his cell, asking for more books, insisting that linguistic work become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, aspiration, rigor, support, and metaphor” all at once.

A Marked Work

And then came the photograph. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, within 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, drained of life among the rubble and debris. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but surviving.

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 carry stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, stubborn declination to vanish.