Within the Ruined Debris of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Volume I Had Rendered

Within the wreckage of a fallen apartment block, a particular vision stayed with me: a book I had rendered from the English language to Persian, sitting partially covered in dust and ash. Its jacket was shredded and dirtied, its pages curled and burned, but it was still readable. Still uttering words.

A City Amid Attack

Two days earlier, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, forceful explosions. The web was entirely disconnected. I was in my flat, rendering a work about what it means to carry words across languages, and the ethics and concerns of inhabiting a different narrative. As structures collapsed, I sat revising a text that argued, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything stopped. A book my publishing house had been about to publish was stuck when the facility shut down. Retailers locked their doors one by one. One night, when the blasts 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, hard-to-find books I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That library was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Distance and Devastation

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure locations – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a picture: in the faraway, a factory was burning, thick smoke coiling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, feelings swept through the city like weather: instant terror, unease, righteous anger at the injustice, then detachment. Beyond the personal impact, the attack destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick searches and materials that the work demands.

Outside, blast waves ripped windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the possessions lay broken, objects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, working at an easel, choosing not to let quiet and debris have the ultimate victory.

Converting Pain

A photograph circulated on social media of a young poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman hurrying between alleyways, calling a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some deep-seated remembrance. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: turning destruction into image, loss into lines, sorrow into search.

The Craft as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself working on a fable 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 lost 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 tranquility we all longed for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond literary craft: it was an act of defiance, of holding one's ground, of persisting.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his prison cell, asking for more books, insisting that linguistic work become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, goal, discipline, anchor, and metaphor” all at once.

An Enduring Work

And then came the photograph. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, damaged but surviving, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been devoid of color, 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 visible – scarred, but surviving.

I looked at 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 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 disappears. It is a persistent, stubborn declination to vanish.