Within the Devastated Remains of an Apartment Block, I Found a Volume I Had Rendered

In the wreckage of a collapsed building, a solitary sight remained with me: a tome I had translated from the English language to Persian, sitting half-buried in dirt and soot. Its cover was shredded and dirtied, its sheets curled and burned, but it was still legible. Still communicating.

An Urban Center Under Attack

Two days prior, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, powerful detonations. The digital network was completely cut off. I was in my residence, working on a book about what it means to move text across languages, and the morals and worries of occupying another’s narrative. As buildings fell, I sat revising a text that argued, in its understated way, for the persistence of purpose.

Everything ceased. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to send to press was halted when the printer shut down. Shops locked their doors one by one. One night, when the explosions were too close, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, stocked with lexicons, hard-to-find editions I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Separation and Grief

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous towns – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a picture: in the background, a industrial site was burning, thick smoke curling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions passed over the city like a storm: sudden fear, apprehension, indignation at the unfairness, then detachment. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick searches and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, blast waves ripped windows from their sashes; at a family member's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the belongings lay ruined, personal effects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, painting at an stand, choosing not to let stillness and debris have the final say.

Transforming Grief

A photograph circulated online of a 23-year-old poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman dashing between alleyways, shouting a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some repressed memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: transforming destruction into art, death into verse, sorrow into quest.

The Work as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself rendering a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep 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 unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all desired – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth pursuing.

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

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

An Enduring Voice

And then came the image. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, damaged but surviving, my name printed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been devoid of color, stripped of life among the debris and debris. For most of my career, I had been invisible, 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 statement”, but I had never felt the full weight of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else disappears. It is a subtle, stubborn declination to be silenced.