Amid the Ruined Debris of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Volume I’d Rendered

In the debris of a fallen structure, a single vision lingered with me: a book I had converted from the English language to Farsi, lying half-buried in dirt and ash. Its front was ripped and smudged, its sheets bent and singed, but it was still readable. Still uttering words.

A Metropolis Under Bombardment

Two days before, missiles started hitting the city. There were no sirens, just abrupt, powerful detonations. The internet was completely cut off. I was in my flat, working on a book about what it means to move words across cultures, and the morals and concerns of inhabiting a different voice. As structures came down, I sat revising a text that contended, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything halted. A project my publisher had been about to publish was halted when the printer closed. Retailers locked their doors one by one. One night, when the explosions were too close, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the library in my apartment, stocked with lexicons, hard-to-find editions I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Separation and Grief

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous areas – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a photo: in the distance, a plant was on fire, dark smoke spiraling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, moods swept through the city like a front: swift fear, anxiety, moral outrage at the unfairness, then numbness. Beyond the emotional toll, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and references that the work demands.

Outside, blast waves tore windows from their sashes; at a relative's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the belongings lay ruined, household items scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, creating at an easel, declining to let quiet and dust have the final say.

Converting Pain

A image spread on social media of a 23-year-old poet who was died when missiles struck a building. Her poem went spread rapidly next to her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an aged woman dashing between alleys, yelling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some repressed memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: transforming devastation into picture, death into verse, sorrow into longing.

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself rendering 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 deep 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 impossible. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all yearned for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than an art form: it was an act of perseverance, of staying put, of persisting.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his confinement, asking for more resources, insisting that linguistic work become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, hope, practice, support, and metaphor” all at once.

A Scarred Work

And then came the photograph. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, damaged but whole, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, drained of life among the rubble and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but surviving.

I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a act with consequences”, but I had never felt the full weight 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 carry stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else falls away. It is a subtle, unyielding declination to vanish.