Among those Ruined Debris of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Volume I Had Translated

In the wreckage of a fallen apartment block, a particular image stayed with me: a tome I had converted from English to Persian, sitting partially covered in dust and soot. Its jacket was shredded and dirtied, its sheets bent and scorched, but it was still legible. Still communicating.

A City Amid Bombardment

Two days prior, rockets began striking the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, violent blasts. The internet was totally cut off. I was in my apartment, rendering a book about what it means to transport text across languages, and the ethics and anxieties of occupying a different voice. As structures came down, I sat revising a text that argued, in its quiet way, for the endurance of purpose.

Everything halted. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to publish was stuck when the facility shut down. Retailers shut 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 library in my apartment, holding reference books, rare books I had spent years collecting 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 survive the night.

Dispersal and Loss

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure areas – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a factory was burning, dark smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to chase them.

During those days, moods moved through the city like a storm: swift fear, apprehension, righteous anger at the injustice, then apathy. Beyond the personal impact, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant look-ups and references that the craft demands.

Outside, blast waves tore windows from their sashes; at a relative's house, every window was destroyed, the belongings lay damaged, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, creating at an stand, refusing to let stillness and dirt have the final say.

Translating Sorrow

A image was shared digitally of a 23-year-old artist who was died when missiles struck a building. Her writing went was widely shared with her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an elderly woman hurrying between alleys, yelling a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: transforming ruin into image, demise into verse, grief into search.

The Work as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself rendering 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 reaching for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all longed for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than an art form: it was an act of perseverance, of holding one's ground, of holding on.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker 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 truth, aspiration, discipline, foundation, and metaphor” all at once.

A Marked Work

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

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 full weight of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else falls away. It is a persistent, unyielding declination to vanish.