Amid the Ruined Remains of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Volume I Had Translated

Among the wreckage of a fallen building, a solitary vision stayed with me: a volume I had translated from English to Persian, sitting partially covered in dirt and ash. Its cover was ripped and smudged, its leaves bent and scorched, but it was still readable. Still communicating.

A Metropolis During Assault

Two days before, rockets started hitting the city. There were no sirens, just abrupt, powerful blasts. The digital network was entirely severed. I was in my apartment, rendering a text about what it means to transport words across cultures, and the ethics and anxieties of inhabiting another’s narrative. As buildings fell, I sat revising a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything halted. A book my publishing house had been about to publish was stuck when the printing house ceased operations. Retailers closed one by one. One night, when the explosions were too nearby, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, holding reference books, rare volumes I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That library was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Distance and Loss

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be safer locations – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a image: in the distance, a factory was burning, black smoke coiling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly somewhere else, and peril seemed to chase them.

During those days, feelings swept through the city like a front: sudden terror, apprehension, moral outrage at the wrong, then detachment. Beyond the personal impact, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and materials that the work demands.

Outside, concussive forces ripped windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every sheet of glass was destroyed, the belongings lay ruined, personal effects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, painting at an easel, refusing to let stillness and dust have the ultimate victory.

Transforming Grief

A picture circulated digitally of a 23-year-old artist who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an elderly woman hurrying between passages, yelling a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some deep-seated recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: changing ruin into picture, loss into poetry, sorrow into longing.

The Work as Defiance

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 heal only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet continued working until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all longed for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond literary craft: it was an act of perseverance, of remaining, of persisting.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; 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 “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, goal, practice, foundation, and metaphor” all at once.

A Marked Voice

And then came the photograph. I noticed it on a platform and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, marked but intact, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, drained of life among the concrete and debris. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but persisting.

I stared 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 attack, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, stubborn rejection to vanish.