Amid those Devastated Debris of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Volume I Had Translated

In the wreckage of a destroyed apartment block, a solitary vision stayed with me: a volume I had converted from English to Persian, sitting partly concealed in dust and soot. Its front was torn and dirtied, its sheets bent and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating.

A Metropolis Under Assault

Two days before, missiles started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, forceful blasts. The digital network was entirely disconnected. I was in my apartment, translating a work about what it means to carry words across cultures, and the morals and worries of inhabiting a different narrative. As buildings collapsed, I sat revising a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publisher had been about to publish was stuck when the printing house ceased operations. Retailers locked their doors one by one. One night, when the explosions were too nearby, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop thinking about the shelves in my apartment, holding reference books, valuable editions I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Distance and Devastation

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous areas – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a photo: in the distance, a factory was ablaze, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly far away, and threat seemed to pursue them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like weather: swift terror, anxiety, indignation at the injustice, then apathy. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and references that translation demands.

Outside, blast waves tore windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every pane was shattered, the possessions lay broken, objects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, painting at an easel, refusing to let silence and dirt have the last word.

Converting Grief

A picture spread on social media of a 23-year-old writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an elderly woman hurrying between alleyways, shouting a name. People said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried recollection. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: transforming destruction into picture, demise into lines, mourning into quest.

The Craft as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself rendering 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 continued producing until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all longed for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than an art form: it was an act of perseverance, of staying put, of enduring.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his prison cell, asking for more books, insisting that translation become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, aspiration, practice, foundation, and analogy” all at once.

A Marked Work

And then came the picture. I noticed it on a news site and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, marked but surviving, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, stripped of life among the rubble and debris. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but enduring.

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 bombardment, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else crumbles. It is a subtle, unyielding refusal to vanish.