Amid the Devastated Remains of an Apartment Block, I Found a Book I’d Rendered

Within the rubble of a collapsed apartment block, a solitary vision lingered with me: a volume I had converted from English to Farsi, lying partially covered in dust and soot. Its front was torn and smudged, its sheets curled and burned, but it was still readable. Still uttering words.

A City Under Attack

Two days before, rockets commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just sudden, violent blasts. The internet was entirely severed. I was in my residence, working on a book about what it means to carry words across tongues, and the ethics and worries of inhabiting someone else's perspective. As edifices fell, I sat editing a text that argued, in its understated way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything halted. A book my publishing house had been about to publish was stuck when the printing house ceased operations. Bookstores closed one by one. One night, when the explosions were too close, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, stocked with lexicons, rare editions I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That library was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Dispersal and Grief

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be safer 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 plant was on fire, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and danger seemed to chase them.

During those days, emotions passed over the city like a storm: instant fear, apprehension, moral outrage at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick searches and references that the craft demands.

Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their sashes; at a family member's house, every pane was broken, the belongings lay damaged, objects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an stand, refusing to let silence and dust have the last word.

Converting Grief

A picture was shared online of a young poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman dashing between alleys, 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 recollection. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: transforming devastation into art, demise into lines, sorrow into quest.

The Craft as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of devastation, I found myself translating a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who lost 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 peace we all yearned for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond an art form: it was an act of resistance, of holding one's ground, of enduring.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his cell, asking for more books, insisting that linguistic work become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, hope, discipline, support, and analogy” all at once.

An Enduring Voice

And then came the image. I saw it on a website and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, scarred but surviving, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, devoid of life among the concrete and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but enduring.

I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else falls away. It is a subtle, unyielding refusal to be silenced.