Among the Ruined Remains of an Apartment Block, I Found a Volume I’d Rendered

Among the debris of a fallen building, a particular sight lingered with me: a tome I had converted from the English language to Farsi, sitting partly concealed in dirt and soot. Its cover was shredded and smudged, its pages curled and scorched, but it was still legible. Still speaking.

A City Under Bombardment

Two days before, missiles commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, powerful explosions. The web was completely cut off. I was in my residence, rendering a work about what it means to transport language across cultures, and the ethics and concerns of occupying another’s narrative. As structures collapsed, I sat revising a text that suggested, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of significance.

Everything halted. A book my publisher had been about to publish was halted when the facility ceased operations. Shops locked their doors one by one. One night, when the explosions were too close, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the bookshelves in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, valuable volumes I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Dispersal and Grief

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure locations – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a picture: in the faraway, a plant was on fire, dark smoke coiling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to follow them.

During those days, feelings moved through the city like a front: instant terror, unease, moral outrage at the wrong, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the attack eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant look-ups and materials that translation demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their frames; at a relative's house, every window was destroyed, the belongings lay broken, personal effects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an easel, refusing to let quiet and dust have the final say.

Translating Sorrow

A picture circulated digitally of a 23-year-old poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral alongside her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an elderly woman hurrying between alleyways, calling a name. People said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried remembrance. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: turning destruction into image, loss into poetry, sorrow into search.

The Work as Persistence

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 get better only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted working until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all longed for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than an art form: it was an act of perseverance, of remaining, of enduring.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his confinement, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that language study become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, goal, rigor, foundation, and analogy” all at once.

An Enduring Legacy

And then came the picture. I saw it on a news site and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, damaged but surviving, my name printed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been black and white, drained of life among the concrete and ruins. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – 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 obliterated. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else disappears. It is a subtle, stubborn refusal to vanish.