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

Among the debris of a destroyed structure, a solitary sight stayed with me: a book I had translated from English to Persian, lying partially covered in dirt and soot. Its jacket was shredded and dirtied, its leaves curled and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating.

An Urban Center Amid Assault

Two days before, rockets commenced attacking the city. There were no sirens, just abrupt, powerful explosions. The internet was completely cut off. I was in my residence, rendering a text about what it means to carry text across cultures, and the morals and worries of inhabiting another’s perspective. As structures fell, I sat revising a text that argued, in its understated way, for the endurance of meaning.

Everything stopped. A project my publishing house had been about to go to print was halted when the printing house shut down. Shops shut one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop thinking about the shelves in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, rare books I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That library was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Separation and Devastation

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be safer locations – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a photo: in the faraway, a factory was on fire, black smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to chase them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like weather: instant dread, unease, righteous anger at the wrong, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling 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, concussive forces blew windows from their frames; at a relative's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the possessions lay broken, objects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, working at an stand, choosing not to let silence and dirt have the last word.

Transforming Sorrow

A picture was shared online of a 23-year-old artist who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an aged woman dashing between alleyways, yelling 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 searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: turning destruction into image, death into lines, grief into longing.

The Work as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of ruin, I found myself working on a fable about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant 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 aiming at the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all longed for – seemingly impossible, 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 broad sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that translation become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, goal, practice, support, and metaphor” all at once.

A Scarred Legacy

And then came the picture. I saw it on a platform and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, damaged but intact, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, devoid of life among the concrete and debris. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but persisting.

I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a political act”, but I had never felt the full weight of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else disappears. It is a subtle, determined rejection to be silenced.