Amid those Ruined Debris of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Volume I’d Rendered

Among the wreckage of a destroyed building, a solitary vision lingered with me: a tome I had converted from the English language to Farsi, sitting partially covered in dust and ash. Its cover was shredded and smudged, its leaves curled and burned, but it was still readable. Still communicating.

An Urban Center Amid Assault

Two days prior, missiles commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just sudden, violent detonations. The internet was totally severed. I was in my apartment, translating a text about what it means to carry words across tongues, and the ethics and anxieties of taking on another’s voice. As edifices came down, I sat revising a text that suggested, in its quiet way, for the endurance of meaning.

Everything halted. A book my publishing house had been about to publish was stuck when the facility shut down. Retailers closed 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 worrying about the bookshelves in my apartment, filled with reference books, hard-to-find books I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Distance and Devastation

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure towns – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a factory was burning, black smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly somewhere else, and threat seemed to chase them.

During those days, emotions passed over the city like weather: instant fear, anxiety, indignation at the wrong, then detachment. Beyond the personal impact, the bombardment eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate searches and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces blew windows from their casings; at a family member's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the possessions lay ruined, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an easel, refusing to let silence and dust have the last word.

Converting Pain

A photograph spread digitally of a 23-year-old artist who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an elderly woman dashing between alleyways, calling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some repressed memory. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: transforming ruin into art, death into lines, mourning into quest.

Translation as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst devastation, I found myself working on a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can hold 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 striving for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all yearned for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond an art form: it was an act of defiance, of staying put, of holding on.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his cell, asking for more resources, insisting that linguistic work become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, goal, rigor, support, and metaphor” all at once.

A Scarred Voice

And then came the image. I noticed it on a news site and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, damaged but whole, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, stripped of life among the rubble and ruins. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – 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 full weight of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else falls away. It is a quiet, unyielding rejection to vanish.