Amid those Devastated Remains of an Apartment Block, I Found a Volume I Had Translated

In the debris of a destroyed apartment block, a single sight lingered with me: a tome I had translated from English to Farsi, sitting partly concealed in dirt and soot. Its jacket was torn and stained, its leaves bent and burned, but it was still legible. Still speaking.

A Metropolis Under Attack

Two days prior, missiles started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, violent explosions. The internet was completely cut off. I was in my flat, working on a text about what it means to carry words across cultures, and the morals and concerns of taking on another’s narrative. As structures came down, I sat editing a text that suggested, in its subtle way, for the endurance of meaning.

Everything halted. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to go to print was stranded when the facility ceased operations. Shops shut one by one. One night, when the blasts were too nearby, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the bookshelves in my apartment, filled with dictionaries, valuable volumes I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Distance and Grief

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous towns – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a plant was on fire, dark smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and peril seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods passed over the city like a storm: instant dread, apprehension, righteous anger at the wrong, then numbness. Beyond the emotional toll, the attack destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick queries and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, blast waves tore windows from their casings; at a relative's house, every window was shattered, the possessions lay ruined, objects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an stand, choosing not to let quiet and dirt have the final say.

Translating Grief

A image spread digitally of a 23-year-old poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an elderly woman hurrying between alleys, shouting a name. People said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some repressed memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: transforming devastation into image, loss into verse, sorrow into longing.

The Craft as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself working on a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet continued working until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth striving for.

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

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his prison cell, asking for more books, insisting that translation become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, goal, rigor, anchor, and symbol” all at once.

A Marked Voice

And then came the picture. I noticed it on a news site and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, scarred but surviving, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, devoid 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 apparent – 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 full weight of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else falls away. It is a quiet, stubborn declination to vanish.