Amid those Devastated Debris of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Volume I’d Translated

Among the rubble of a collapsed apartment block, a single image stayed with me: a tome I had converted from English to Farsi, resting partially covered in dirt and ash. Its cover was shredded and stained, its leaves bent and singed, but it was still legible. Still speaking.

An Urban Center Under Bombardment

Two days prior, missiles started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just unexpected, forceful detonations. The digital network was entirely severed. I was in my residence, translating a work about what it means to move language across languages, and the principles and anxieties of occupying another’s voice. As structures fell, I sat editing a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the endurance of meaning.

Everything ceased. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to publish was stuck when the printing house closed. Retailers closed one by one. One night, when the explosions were too nearby, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the library in my apartment, stocked with lexicons, 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 survive the night.

Distance and Devastation

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be safer towns – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a picture: in the background, a plant was ablaze, dark smoke coiling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, moods swept through the city like a front: instant fear, anxiety, moral outrage at the wrong, then detachment. Beyond the personal impact, the attack eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant look-ups and sources that translation demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their sashes; at a relative's house, every pane was destroyed, the belongings lay ruined, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, working at an easel, declining to let silence and dust have the last word.

Transforming Grief

A picture circulated online of a young writer who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her verse went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an elderly woman running between alleyways, yelling a name. People said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some buried recollection. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: turning destruction into art, death into verse, sorrow into search.

The Craft as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself working on a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet kept creating until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all longed for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth pursuing.

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

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

An Enduring Legacy

And then came the picture. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, damaged but surviving, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been black and white, stripped of life among the concrete and wreckage. 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 fire, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else falls away. It is a persistent, unyielding declination to disappear.