Within those Ruined Debris of an Apartment Block, I Found a Volume I’d Rendered

In the wreckage of a collapsed apartment block, a single sight lingered with me: a volume I had translated from English to Persian, sitting partly concealed in dirt and soot. Its jacket was shredded and dirtied, its pages curled and scorched, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating.

A Metropolis Amid Bombardment

Two days prior, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no sirens, just unexpected, violent blasts. The internet was entirely disconnected. I was in my flat, working on a text about what it means to move text across cultures, and the principles and worries of taking on a different narrative. As buildings came down, I sat revising a text that contended, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of significance.

Everything ceased. A project my publisher had been about to send to press was halted when the facility closed. Bookstores closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too nearby, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, holding lexicons, rare editions I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That library was my career's work, 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 locations – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a plant was burning, dark smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, moods moved through the city like a front: instant terror, anxiety, indignation at the wrong, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick look-ups and references that the craft demands.

Outside, shockwaves ripped windows from their frames; at a relative's house, every sheet of glass was destroyed, the belongings lay ruined, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an stand, declining to let silence and dirt have the ultimate victory.

Translating Grief

A picture circulated on social media of a young artist who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her verse went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an older woman running 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 buried remembrance. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: changing ruin into picture, demise into poetry, sorrow into longing.

The Craft as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself working on a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can possess 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 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 more than literary craft: it was an act of defiance, of remaining, of holding on.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his confinement, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that linguistic work become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, aspiration, practice, foundation, and analogy” all at once.

An Enduring Work

And then came the picture. I saw it on a news site and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, scarred but surviving, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, drained of life among the rubble and ruins. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but persisting.

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 full weight of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, determined rejection to disappear.