Within the Devastated Remains of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Volume I’d Translated

Within the rubble of a destroyed structure, a single vision stayed with me: a volume I had rendered from English to Persian, sitting partially covered in dirt and ash. Its front was torn and smudged, its pages bent and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking.

A City During Attack

Two days prior, rockets started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just sudden, violent detonations. The digital network was completely severed. I was in my apartment, working on a work about what it means to carry words across tongues, and the ethics and anxieties of taking on someone else's voice. As buildings fell, I sat editing a text that contended, in its subtle way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything halted. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to publish was stuck when the printing house closed. Retailers closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the shelves in my apartment, filled with reference books, valuable volumes I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. 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 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 image: in the faraway, a factory was on fire, dark smoke spiraling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and threat seemed to pursue them.

During those days, feelings moved through the city like weather: sudden fear, unease, righteous anger at the injustice, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the bombardment eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and references that translation demands.

Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their casings; at a family member's house, every pane was destroyed, the possessions lay broken, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an stand, declining to let stillness and dust have the final say.

Converting Grief

A picture spread online of a young poet who was died when missiles struck a building. Her writing went spread rapidly alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an aged woman dashing between passages, yelling a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a conflict 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 converting, in our own way: turning ruin into image, death into poetry, sorrow into quest.

The Craft as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by ruin, I found myself working on a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet kept working until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all yearned for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than a skill: it was an act of resistance, of remaining, of holding on.

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 resources, insisting that translation become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, aspiration, discipline, anchor, and analogy” all at once.

An Enduring Work

And then came the picture. I spotted it on a platform and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, marked but whole, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been black and white, stripped of life among the concrete and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but persisting.

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 complete significance 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 transport stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else disappears. It is a subtle, unyielding declination to vanish.