Amid the Devastated Remains of an Apartment Block, I Found a Volume I’d Rendered

Within the debris of a destroyed building, a solitary image remained with me: a volume I had converted from the English language to Farsi, sitting partly concealed in dust and ash. Its front was shredded and smudged, its leaves curled and burned, but it was still legible. Still communicating.

An Urban Center Under Bombardment

Two days before, projectiles started hitting the city. There were no sirens, just sudden, forceful blasts. The digital network was totally cut off. I was in my apartment, working on a work about what it means to transport text across languages, and the ethics and concerns of inhabiting another’s voice. As structures fell, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of significance.

Everything stopped. A book my publishing house had been about to send to press was stuck when the facility ceased operations. Bookstores shut one by one. One night, when the explosions were too imminent, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop worrying about the bookshelves in my apartment, filled with dictionaries, valuable editions I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Dispersal and Loss

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous locations – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a photo: in the background, a plant was on fire, dark smoke spiraling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to chase them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like a storm: sudden dread, anxiety, moral outrage at the unfairness, then numbness. Beyond the psychological cost, the bombardment eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick searches and sources that the work demands.

Outside, blast waves ripped windows from their casings; at a relative's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the possessions lay ruined, objects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, creating at an stand, choosing not to let quiet and debris have the ultimate victory.

Converting Pain

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

We were all translating, in our own way: turning devastation into image, death into verse, sorrow into search.

The Craft as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still amidst destruction, I found myself rendering a fable about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet continued creating until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all longed for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than literary craft: it was an act of resistance, of remaining, of holding on.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his confinement, asking for more books, insisting that linguistic work become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, hope, practice, foundation, and metaphor” all at once.

A Scarred Voice

And then came the photograph. I saw it on a news site and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, scarred but intact, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, stripped of life among the debris 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 gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, stubborn refusal to disappear.