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

In the wreckage of a collapsed building, a particular image remained with me: a tome I had rendered from English to Persian, resting partly concealed in dust and soot. Its cover was ripped and smudged, its leaves curled and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating.

A City Amid Attack

Two days earlier, rockets commenced attacking the city. There were no sirens, just sudden, forceful blasts. The internet was entirely severed. I was in my apartment, working on a text about what it means to move words across cultures, and the morals and anxieties of taking on another’s narrative. As structures fell, I sat revising a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the persistence of meaning.

Everything halted. A book my publishing house had been about to go to print was stuck when the facility shut down. Retailers locked their doors one by one. One night, when the booms were too close, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the library in my apartment, filled with reference books, valuable books I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Distance and Grief

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure towns – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a photo: in the background, a industrial site was ablaze, black smoke coiling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to pursue them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like a storm: swift dread, unease, moral outrage at the unfairness, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and references that the work demands.

Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every pane was shattered, the furniture lay broken, objects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, painting at an easel, choosing not to let silence and debris have the ultimate victory.

Transforming Grief

A picture was shared on social media of a 23-year-old writer who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her poem went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an older woman hurrying between alleys, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had mourned 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 translating, in our own way: changing ruin into image, demise into poetry, mourning into longing.

The Craft as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself translating a story for young readers 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 lost 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 tranquility we all yearned for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth pursuing.

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

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his confinement, asking for more resources, insisting that linguistic work become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, goal, practice, support, and metaphor” all at once.

An Enduring Legacy

And then came the photograph. I noticed it on a platform and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, scarred but intact, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, drained of life among the debris and debris. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but surviving.

I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a political act”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else falls away. It is a persistent, determined declination to be silenced.