Within the Ruined Remains of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Volume I Had Translated

Among the wreckage of a collapsed structure, a single image stayed with me: a tome I had rendered from English to Persian, sitting partially covered in dirt and ash. Its cover was ripped and stained, its pages bent and scorched, but it was still decipherable. Still uttering words.

An Urban Center During Assault

Two days before, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no sirens, just sudden, violent blasts. The digital network was completely disconnected. I was in my residence, rendering a book about what it means to carry text across tongues, and the principles and worries of occupying another’s narrative. As edifices fell, I sat revising a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything ceased. A book my publishing house had been about to publish was stranded when the printing house shut down. Retailers closed one by one. One night, when the booms were too nearby, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the bookshelves in my apartment, holding dictionaries, valuable editions I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Distance and Grief

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure locations – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the background, a industrial site was burning, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, feelings swept through the city like weather: swift dread, unease, righteous anger at the wrong, then apathy. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and sources that translation demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their casings; at a family member's house, every window was shattered, the furniture lay broken, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an easel, refusing to let silence and dust have the last word.

Converting Sorrow

A picture circulated online of a 23-year-old writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral with her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman running between alleys, yelling a name. People said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some deep-seated remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: transforming ruin into art, loss into poetry, sorrow into search.

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of destruction, I found myself working on a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted producing until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all longed for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth striving for.

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

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his confinement, asking for more books, insisting that language study become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, hope, rigor, foundation, and analogy” all at once.

A Marked Voice

And then came the photograph. I spotted it on a website and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, damaged but intact, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, devoid of life among the debris 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 gazed upon 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 mattered”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, determined rejection to vanish.