Amid those Ruined Remains of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Book I’d Translated

Within the wreckage of a collapsed apartment block, a solitary image remained with me: a tome I had converted from English to Farsi, lying partially covered in dirt and ash. Its front was torn and stained, its pages bent and burned, but it was still readable. Still communicating.

A Metropolis Under Attack

Two days earlier, rockets began striking the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, powerful blasts. The internet was totally disconnected. I was in my flat, translating a book about what it means to move language across tongues, and the principles and anxieties of taking on someone else's perspective. As edifices collapsed, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its subtle way, for the persistence of significance.

Everything stopped. A project my publisher had been about to go to print was halted when the facility ceased operations. Shops locked their doors one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop thinking about the bookshelves in my apartment, holding lexicons, rare books I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That library was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Dispersal and Devastation

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous locations – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a photo: in the distance, a plant was burning, dark smoke curling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, moods moved through the city like weather: instant terror, unease, moral outrage at the wrong, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate searches and sources that translation demands.

Outside, shockwaves ripped windows from their casings; at a family member's house, every window was broken, the belongings lay broken, objects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an stand, choosing not to let silence and dirt have the last word.

Translating Grief

A image was shared on social media of a young poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an older woman hurrying between alleys, yelling a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some repressed recollection. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: transforming ruin into image, death into lines, mourning into longing.

Translation as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst ruin, I found myself working on a children’s tale 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 reaching for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than an art form: it was an act of resistance, of staying put, of holding on.

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

A Scarred Voice

And then came the picture. I spotted it on a website and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, scarred but surviving, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, stripped of life among the rubble and debris. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but enduring.

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 true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else crumbles. It is a subtle, determined rejection to be silenced.