Amid those Devastated Debris of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Volume I Had Rendered

In the rubble of a fallen building, a solitary vision stayed with me: a book I had rendered from English to Persian, lying half-buried in dust and ash. Its jacket was shredded and stained, its leaves bent and singed, but it was still legible. Still communicating.

A Metropolis Under Attack

Two days earlier, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, forceful explosions. The internet was entirely cut off. I was in my apartment, rendering a book about what it means to carry words across tongues, and the ethics and anxieties of inhabiting a different narrative. As buildings collapsed, I sat editing a text that argued, in its subtle way, for the persistence of significance.

Everything ceased. A manuscript my publisher had been about to send to press was halted when the facility closed. Retailers closed one by one. One night, when the explosions were too nearby, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the basement. 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 life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Separation and Loss

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure towns – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a photo: in the faraway, a plant was ablaze, dark smoke spiraling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods passed over the city like a front: instant fear, unease, indignation at the wrong, then apathy. Beyond the personal impact, the attack destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant look-ups and sources that the craft demands.

Outside, blast waves blew windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every window was shattered, the furniture lay ruined, household items scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, painting at an stand, declining to let quiet and dust have the last word.

Converting Sorrow

A photograph was shared digitally of a 23-year-old writer who was died when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral alongside her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman dashing between passages, calling a name. People said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some buried memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: turning devastation into picture, loss into verse, mourning into longing.

Translation as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of devastation, I found myself translating a fable about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet kept producing until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all yearned for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth striving for.

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

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his prison cell, asking for more resources, insisting that language study become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, goal, practice, foundation, and analogy” all at once.

An Enduring Voice

And then came the image. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, scarred but intact, my name shown 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 anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but persisting.

I stared at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, determined declination to vanish.