Within those Devastated Remains of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Book I’d Rendered

Within the debris of a destroyed apartment block, a particular vision lingered with me: a book I had converted from the English language to Farsi, sitting partially covered in dirt and soot. Its cover was torn and dirtied, its pages bent and scorched, but it was still legible. Still uttering words.

An Urban Center Amid Bombardment

Two days prior, rockets started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, forceful blasts. The internet was completely disconnected. I was in my apartment, translating a text about what it means to carry language across tongues, and the morals and concerns of inhabiting a different perspective. As edifices came down, I sat polishing a text that contended, in its subtle way, for the persistence of purpose.

Everything ceased. A project my publishing house had been about to go to print was stuck when the facility shut down. Shops locked their doors one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, filled with reference books, rare editions I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Separation and Grief

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous towns – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a plant was ablaze, dark smoke curling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, moods swept through the city like a storm: sudden terror, apprehension, moral outrage at the injustice, then apathy. Beyond the personal impact, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant look-ups and references that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their sashes; at a relative's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the possessions lay broken, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an easel, choosing not to let quiet and debris have the ultimate victory.

Converting Grief

A image circulated online of a young writer who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an elderly woman running between passages, yelling a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some buried memory. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: changing devastation into art, loss into poetry, mourning into longing.

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst ruin, I found myself translating a fable about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet persisted working until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all longed for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond a skill: it was an act of defiance, of remaining, of enduring.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his confinement, asking for more books, insisting that translation become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, aspiration, rigor, foundation, and metaphor” all at once.

A Scarred Work

And then came the image. I noticed it on a website and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, scarred but whole, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, stripped of life among the rubble and ruins. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but surviving.

I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the full weight of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else falls away. It is a quiet, unyielding refusal to be silenced.