Among those Devastated Debris of an Apartment Block, I Found a Volume I Had Translated

In the debris of a destroyed building, a solitary image remained with me: a tome I had rendered from the English language to Persian, lying half-buried in dirt and soot. Its jacket was torn and stained, its pages bent and scorched, but it was still readable. Still speaking.

An Urban Center During Assault

Two days before, missiles began striking the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, powerful detonations. The web was entirely disconnected. I was in my flat, rendering a work about what it means to carry words across tongues, and the ethics and worries of taking on a different narrative. As buildings collapsed, I sat revising a text that argued, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to send to press was stranded when the facility ceased operations. Retailers locked their doors one by one. One night, when the booms were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the shelves in my apartment, holding dictionaries, valuable books I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Distance and Loss

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure areas – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a picture: in the faraway, a industrial site was ablaze, dark smoke curling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, emotions passed over the city like weather: instant terror, apprehension, moral outrage 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 look-ups and references that the craft demands.

Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every window was destroyed, the possessions lay damaged, objects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, painting at an stand, declining to let quiet and debris have the last word.

Transforming Sorrow

A picture spread online of a 23-year-old artist who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went spread rapidly next to her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman dashing between alleys, yelling a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a conflict 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 destruction into picture, loss into poetry, grief into quest.

The Work as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of devastation, 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 profound meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet continued creating until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than an art form: it was an act of perseverance, 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 confinement, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that linguistic work become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, hope, practice, support, and analogy” all at once.

A Marked Voice

And then came the image. I spotted it on a platform and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, damaged but surviving, 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 rubble 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 mattered”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, stubborn rejection to be silenced.