Amid the Ruined Debris of an Apartment Block, I Found a Volume I’d Rendered

Among the wreckage of a fallen structure, a particular sight lingered with me: a volume I had rendered from English to Persian, lying half-buried in dust and soot. Its jacket was torn and smudged, its leaves bent and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still uttering words.

A City Under Bombardment

Two days before, missiles began striking the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, powerful explosions. The internet was totally disconnected. I was in my flat, rendering a text about what it means to move words across cultures, and the ethics and worries of taking on a different narrative. As buildings collapsed, I sat polishing a text that contended, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything halted. A project my publisher had been about to publish was stranded when the facility ceased operations. Shops closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, filled with lexicons, valuable editions I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Dispersal and Devastation

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure locations – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a photo: in the distance, a industrial site was on fire, dark smoke coiling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions passed over the city like a storm: instant dread, apprehension, moral outrage at the injustice, then apathy. Beyond the personal impact, the attack destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and sources that the craft demands.

Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their casings; at a relative's house, every window was broken, the belongings lay damaged, household items scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, painting at an easel, choosing not to let quiet and dirt have the final say.

Converting Grief

A image spread on social media of a 23-year-old poet who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her writing went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an older woman dashing between alleyways, yelling a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some repressed remembrance. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: changing ruin into image, loss into verse, mourning into search.

Translation as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of destruction, 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 continued creating until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all yearned for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than a skill: it was an act of resistance, of holding one's ground, of enduring.

One day, in bright 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 linguistic work become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, aspiration, discipline, anchor, and symbol” all at once.

An Enduring Voice

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 renditions, marked but whole, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, devoid of life among the rubble and debris. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but surviving.

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 had significance”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else disappears. It is a persistent, stubborn rejection to disappear.