Within those Devastated Remains of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Volume I’d Rendered

Among the wreckage of a fallen structure, a solitary vision lingered with me: a tome I had translated from the English language to Persian, lying half-buried in dirt and soot. Its cover was ripped and smudged, its leaves curled and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating.

A Metropolis Amid Bombardment

Two days prior, rockets began striking the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, violent blasts. The web was completely disconnected. I was in my residence, rendering a work about what it means to move text across languages, and the ethics and anxieties of occupying someone else's narrative. As buildings collapsed, I sat editing a text that contended, in its subtle way, for the endurance of purpose.

Everything halted. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to publish was halted when the printing house ceased operations. Bookstores locked their doors one by one. One night, when the explosions were too close, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the bookshelves in my apartment, holding lexicons, valuable editions I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That library was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Dispersal and Grief

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous locations – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a picture: in the distance, a factory was burning, thick smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to chase them.

During those days, emotions passed over the city like weather: sudden terror, unease, moral outrage at the wrong, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick look-ups and references that the craft demands.

Outside, shockwaves ripped windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every pane was broken, the furniture lay damaged, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an stand, choosing not to let silence and dust have the final say.

Converting Pain

A photograph circulated on social media of a young poet who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman hurrying between alleyways, yelling a name. People said she had mourned 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: changing ruin into picture, death into verse, mourning into quest.

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst destruction, I found myself translating a fable about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can hold 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 reaching for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all longed for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond an art form: it was an act of perseverance, of remaining, of persisting.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that linguistic work 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 Work

And then came the photograph. I noticed it on a news site and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, scarred but intact, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, drained of life among the debris and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – 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 true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else falls away. It is a persistent, unyielding declination to be silenced.