Within those Ruined Remains of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Book I’d Rendered

Among the rubble of a collapsed apartment block, a single image remained with me: a book I had rendered from English to Persian, resting half-buried in dirt and ash. Its jacket was ripped and dirtied, its leaves bent and scorched, but it was still readable. Still communicating.

A City During Attack

Two days prior, missiles started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, violent blasts. The internet was totally cut off. I was in my flat, working on a book about what it means to carry language across cultures, and the morals and anxieties of taking on someone else's perspective. As edifices fell, I sat polishing a text that argued, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of significance.

Everything halted. A book my publisher had been about to go to print was stranded when the printer closed. 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 thinking about the library in my apartment, stocked with lexicons, valuable books 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 companion left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous areas – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a image: in the background, a factory was on fire, thick smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods swept through the city like a storm: swift terror, apprehension, moral outrage at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate searches and sources that the work demands.

Outside, blast waves tore windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every window was shattered, the furniture lay ruined, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an easel, refusing to let stillness and debris have the last word.

Converting Grief

A photograph was shared on social media of a 23-year-old artist who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly alongside her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an older woman hurrying between passages, shouting a name. People said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some repressed recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: turning ruin into image, loss into poetry, grief into search.

Translation as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of ruin, I found myself working on a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will get better 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 persisted creating 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 impossible, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than a skill: it was an act of defiance, of staying put, of holding on.

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

A Scarred Work

And then came the photograph. I saw it on a website and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, marked but surviving, my name displayed 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 debris. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but surviving.

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