Amid those Devastated Debris of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Volume I’d Rendered

In the rubble of a fallen structure, a solitary vision stayed with me: a tome I had rendered from English to Persian, lying half-buried in dirt and soot. Its jacket was torn and smudged, its sheets bent and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking.

An Urban Center Amid Attack

Two days earlier, missiles started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, violent detonations. The digital network was totally severed. I was in my flat, working on a book about what it means to transport language across cultures, and the morals and worries of taking on another’s voice. As structures came down, I sat revising a text that argued, in its quiet way, for the persistence of purpose.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publisher had been about to publish was stuck when the printing house ceased operations. Shops locked their doors one by one. One night, when the booms were too close, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the library in my apartment, stocked with reference books, hard-to-find volumes I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Separation and Loss

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous towns – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a industrial site was ablaze, black smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly somewhere else, and danger seemed to pursue them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like a storm: sudden fear, apprehension, righteous anger at the wrong, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the bombardment eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces blew windows from their sashes; at a relative's house, every window was shattered, the belongings lay ruined, household items scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, painting at an easel, declining to let stillness and debris have the ultimate victory.

Transforming Pain

A image was shared online of a 23-year-old artist who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an older woman running between alleys, calling a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some buried memory. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: turning devastation into art, death into poetry, grief into longing.

The Craft as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst ruin, I found myself translating a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted working until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth striving for.

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

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that language study become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, aspiration, discipline, anchor, and metaphor” all at once.

A Scarred Work

And then came the photograph. I noticed it on a news site and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, scarred but whole, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, stripped of life among the debris and debris. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but surviving.

I stared at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under attack, 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 endure when everything else crumbles. It is a subtle, determined declination to vanish.