Amid those Ruined Remains of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Book I Had Rendered

Among the rubble of a fallen building, a single sight stayed with me: a tome I had translated from English to Persian, lying half-buried in dirt and soot. Its front was shredded and smudged, its pages bent and burned, but it was still legible. Still speaking.

A Metropolis Amid Assault

Two days before, projectiles started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, powerful explosions. The digital network was completely cut off. I was in my apartment, translating a work about what it means to move text across languages, and the principles and anxieties of taking on a different voice. As structures came down, I sat editing a text that contended, in its quiet way, for the endurance of purpose.

Everything stopped. A book my publisher had been about to go to print was halted when the printing house closed. Shops closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop thinking about the bookshelves in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, rare volumes I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Separation and Loss

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure areas – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a picture: in the distance, a plant was burning, thick 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 a front: instant dread, anxiety, righteous anger at the unfairness, then detachment. Beyond the personal impact, the bombardment eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick searches and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces ripped windows from their casings; at a relative's house, every window was broken, the belongings lay broken, household items scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, painting at an easel, choosing not to let stillness and dirt have the last word.

Translating Grief

A picture circulated on social media of a 23-year-old writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her poem went spread rapidly alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an elderly woman running between passages, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some deep-seated remembrance. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

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

The Craft as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself translating a story for young readers 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 kept working until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all yearned for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond an art form: it was an act of perseverance, of remaining, 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 cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that language study become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, hope, discipline, support, and analogy” all at once.

A Marked Work

And then came the image. I noticed 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, devoid of life among the debris and debris. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but surviving.

I stared at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else falls away. It is a persistent, stubborn declination to be silenced.