Among those Ruined Debris of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Volume I’d Rendered

Within the rubble of a collapsed building, a particular image lingered with me: a book I had translated from English to Farsi, lying partly concealed in dust and ash. Its jacket was ripped and stained, its pages curled and singed, but it was still legible. Still communicating.

An Urban Center Under Bombardment

Two days before, projectiles began striking the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, powerful explosions. The internet was totally disconnected. I was in my flat, working on a book about what it means to carry words across languages, and the principles and concerns of inhabiting someone else's perspective. As structures collapsed, I sat revising a text that contended, in its understated way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything stopped. A book 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 booms were too nearby, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the bookshelves in my apartment, filled with dictionaries, rare editions I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Separation and Loss

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure towns – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a picture: in the distance, a plant was on fire, black smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to pursue them.

During those days, emotions moved through the city like weather: instant dread, unease, righteous anger at the wrong, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant look-ups and references that the work demands.

Outside, concussive forces blew windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was destroyed, the furniture lay broken, objects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an easel, refusing to let stillness and dust have the last word.

Transforming Sorrow

A photograph spread on social media of a young poet who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went viral with her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an elderly woman hurrying between alleys, calling a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some deep-seated memory. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: changing destruction into art, death into lines, grief into quest.

The Work as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still amidst destruction, I found myself working on 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 continued working until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility 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 resistance, of holding one's ground, of enduring.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his cell, asking for more books, insisting that language study become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, aspiration, practice, support, and analogy” all at once.

A Marked Work

And then came the picture. I saw it on a platform 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, devoid of life among the rubble and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but surviving.

I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a political act”, but I had never felt the true gravity 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 endure when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, stubborn refusal to be silenced.