Among those Devastated Debris of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Volume I’d Rendered

Among the rubble of a collapsed apartment block, a solitary image lingered with me: a tome I had translated from English to Persian, resting partly concealed in dust and soot. Its jacket was ripped and smudged, its sheets bent and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still uttering words.

A City Amid Bombardment

Two days prior, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just sudden, violent blasts. The internet was completely cut off. I was in my residence, translating a text about what it means to transport words across tongues, and the ethics and concerns of inhabiting another’s voice. As edifices came down, I sat revising a text that contended, in its subtle way, for the endurance of meaning.

Everything stopped. A project my publishing house had been about to send to press was stuck when the printing house shut down. Bookstores locked their doors one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the bookshelves in my apartment, filled with lexicons, hard-to-find volumes I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Dispersal and Devastation

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure towns – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a picture: in the distance, a industrial site was burning, dark smoke curling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like a storm: instant fear, anxiety, righteous anger at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the emotional toll, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and references that translation demands.

Outside, concussive forces blew windows from their casings; at a family member's house, every window was destroyed, the furniture lay broken, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, creating at an stand, choosing not to let stillness and dirt have the ultimate victory.

Transforming Grief

A image was shared online of a young poet who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman dashing between passages, shouting a name. People said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some deep-seated recollection. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: transforming destruction into picture, demise into poetry, sorrow into longing.

Translation as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst ruin, I found myself translating a fable 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 experienced the loss of his sight yet kept creating 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 striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than a skill: it was an act of perseverance, of remaining, of holding on.

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

A Marked Work

And then came the image. I noticed it on a website and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, damaged but whole, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, drained of life among the rubble and ruins. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but persisting.

I stared at 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 mattered”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else disappears. It is a persistent, determined refusal to disappear.