Among the Devastated Remains of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Volume I’d Rendered

Within the debris of a fallen apartment block, a particular image stayed with me: a book I had rendered from English to Persian, resting partially covered in dirt and soot. Its front was shredded and stained, its leaves bent and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking.

A Metropolis Under Bombardment

Two days before, rockets started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, violent blasts. The web was completely cut off. I was in my apartment, rendering a text about what it means to transport words across languages, and the principles and anxieties of occupying a different voice. As buildings collapsed, I sat polishing a text that contended, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything ceased. A book my publishing house had been about to publish was stuck when the printing house shut down. Shops shut one by one. One night, when the booms were too nearby, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the library in my apartment, holding reference books, hard-to-find editions I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That library was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Separation and Devastation

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be safer locations – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a picture: in the background, a plant was on fire, black smoke coiling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to chase them.

During those days, emotions moved through the city like weather: sudden terror, unease, indignation at the injustice, then detachment. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate queries and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, blast waves blew windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the belongings lay broken, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, painting at an stand, choosing not to let quiet and debris have the last word.

Converting Grief

A picture was shared digitally of a 23-year-old writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went was widely shared next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an older woman hurrying between alleys, yelling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some deep-seated recollection. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: turning destruction into picture, demise into poetry, mourning into quest.

Translation as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself translating a fable 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 experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted creating until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all longed for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond literary craft: it was an act of perseverance, of remaining, of persisting.

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

A Scarred Work

And then came the image. I noticed it on a platform and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, damaged but surviving, my name printed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been black and white, devoid of life among the debris and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but enduring.

I stared at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a act with consequences”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else falls away. It is a quiet, unyielding refusal to disappear.