Among the Devastated Remains of an Apartment Block, I Found a Book I Had Rendered

In the wreckage of a destroyed apartment block, a solitary image lingered with me: a volume I had rendered from English to Persian, lying partially covered in dust and ash. Its front was shredded and smudged, its pages bent and burned, but it was still readable. Still uttering words.

An Urban Center Amid Attack

Two days earlier, missiles started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, forceful blasts. The digital network was totally cut off. I was in my apartment, rendering a text about what it means to carry language across cultures, and the principles and concerns of inhabiting a different narrative. As edifices collapsed, I sat editing a text that argued, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything ceased. A book my publisher had been about to publish was stuck when the facility shut down. Retailers closed one by one. One night, when the explosions were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, stocked with reference books, hard-to-find volumes I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That library was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Dispersal and Loss

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure towns – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a picture: in the faraway, a factory was ablaze, black smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to chase them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like a storm: instant terror, unease, moral outrage at the injustice, then apathy. Beyond the emotional toll, the shelling eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant look-ups and materials that the work demands.

Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every pane was broken, the belongings lay broken, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an stand, refusing to let silence and dust have the ultimate victory.

Converting Grief

A photograph circulated online of a 23-year-old artist who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly next to her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an aged woman running between alleys, calling a name. People said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some buried recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: changing devastation into art, demise into lines, grief into longing.

The Craft as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of ruin, 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 profound meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted creating until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all yearned for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward.

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

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his confinement, asking for more resources, insisting that language study become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, hope, discipline, support, and analogy” all at once.

An Enduring Work

And then came the photograph. I spotted it on a website and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, 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 concrete and ruins. For most of my career, I had been invisible, 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 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 erased. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else falls away. It is a subtle, unyielding refusal to vanish.