Amid the Ruined Remains of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Volume I Had Rendered

In the wreckage of a destroyed building, a particular sight lingered with me: a volume I had translated from English to Persian, resting partly concealed in dirt and soot. Its front was shredded and dirtied, its sheets curled and burned, but it was still readable. Still speaking.

A Metropolis During Bombardment

Two days earlier, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, violent explosions. The internet was entirely cut off. I was in my residence, translating a book about what it means to move text across tongues, and the ethics and worries of taking on a different voice. As edifices fell, I sat revising a text that contended, in its understated way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything halted. A project my publishing house had been about to publish was stranded when the printing house ceased operations. Bookstores shut one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the bookshelves in my apartment, filled with dictionaries, rare books I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Distance and Loss

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure locations – 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 distance, a plant was burning, black smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to chase them.

During those days, moods passed over the city like a storm: sudden dread, apprehension, moral outrage at the wrong, then apathy. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick look-ups and sources that the work demands.

Outside, concussive forces blew windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every pane was broken, the possessions lay broken, objects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an easel, declining to let quiet and debris have the ultimate victory.

Transforming Sorrow

A image was shared digitally of a 23-year-old artist who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral alongside her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman hurrying between alleyways, calling a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some deep-seated memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: turning destruction into image, death into verse, mourning into quest.

The Work as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst devastation, I found myself working on a story for young readers 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 lost his sight yet kept creating until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all yearned for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than literary craft: it was an act of resistance, of remaining, of enduring.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his prison cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that translation become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, aspiration, practice, support, and metaphor” all at once.

A Marked Legacy

And then came the picture. I spotted it on a platform and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, scarred but surviving, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, stripped 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 visible – scarred, but persisting.

I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else falls away. It is a subtle, determined rejection to vanish.