Within the Devastated Debris of an Apartment Block, I Found a Volume I’d Rendered

Within the wreckage of a destroyed building, a particular sight remained with me: a book I had translated from English to Persian, resting partially covered in dust and soot. Its front was shredded and dirtied, its sheets bent and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking.

An Urban Center During Bombardment

Two days before, rockets commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, powerful detonations. The internet was totally disconnected. I was in my apartment, working on a book about what it means to transport text across languages, and the principles and concerns of inhabiting a different perspective. As structures came down, I sat editing a text that suggested, in its quiet way, for the endurance of purpose.

Everything ceased. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to send to press was stranded when the printing house ceased operations. Bookstores closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the library in my apartment, stocked with reference books, valuable books I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Separation and Loss

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure towns – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a picture: in the background, a plant was on fire, dark smoke spiraling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods moved through the city like a storm: sudden dread, anxiety, righteous anger at the wrong, then numbness. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and references that translation demands.

Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their sashes; at a relative's house, every sheet of glass was destroyed, the possessions lay broken, personal effects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, painting at an easel, declining to let quiet and dirt have the final say.

Converting Grief

A image spread on social media of a young writer who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an elderly woman running between alleyways, shouting a name. People said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some buried remembrance. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: turning destruction into image, demise into lines, mourning into search.

The Craft as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by ruin, I found myself working on a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted creating until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all yearned for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth pursuing.

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

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

An Enduring Work

And then came the image. I spotted it on a website and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, marked but surviving, my name shown 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 enduring.

I stared at 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 bombardment, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, stubborn refusal to disappear.