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

Among the debris of a fallen structure, a particular image lingered with me: a tome I had rendered from the English language to Persian, sitting partially covered in dust and ash. Its cover was shredded and stained, its leaves bent and singed, but it was still legible. Still communicating.

An Urban Center Under Bombardment

Two days prior, rockets started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, forceful detonations. The digital network was totally disconnected. I was in my flat, working on a work about what it means to carry text across tongues, and the ethics and anxieties of occupying someone else's perspective. As edifices came down, I sat polishing a text that contended, in its quiet way, for the persistence of significance.

Everything halted. A manuscript my publisher had been about to send to press was stranded when the facility shut down. Shops locked their doors one by one. One night, when the booms were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, stocked with reference books, hard-to-find editions I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Distance and Devastation

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure locations – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a image: in the background, a plant was on fire, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly far away, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like a storm: swift terror, unease, indignation at the wrong, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the bombardment eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and sources that the work demands.

Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their frames; at a relative's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the belongings lay damaged, household items scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an easel, declining to let silence and dust have the final say.

Translating Pain

A photograph circulated on social media of a 23-year-old writer who was died when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral with her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an elderly woman dashing between alleys, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some deep-seated memory. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: transforming devastation into image, demise into poetry, sorrow into quest.

The Work as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of devastation, I found myself translating 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 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 unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all yearned for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth pursuing.

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

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his confinement, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that linguistic work become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, aspiration, rigor, foundation, and analogy” all at once.

A Marked Voice

And then came the picture. 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 printed 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 enduring.

I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, determined declination to vanish.