Amid those Devastated Remains of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Volume I’d Rendered

In the rubble of a destroyed apartment block, a particular vision stayed with me: a volume I had converted from the English language to Persian, resting partly concealed in dust and ash. Its front was shredded and dirtied, its leaves curled and burned, but it was still readable. Still uttering words.

A Metropolis Amid Attack

Two days earlier, projectiles began striking the city. There were no sirens, just abrupt, powerful explosions. The digital network was completely disconnected. I was in my flat, rendering a text about what it means to carry language across languages, and the morals and anxieties of inhabiting a different voice. As edifices came down, I sat polishing a text that argued, in its subtle way, for the persistence of purpose.

Everything stopped. A book my publishing house had been about to go to print was halted when the facility shut down. Bookstores closed one by one. One night, when the booms were too nearby, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop worrying about the bookshelves in my apartment, filled with lexicons, rare editions I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That library was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Separation and Grief

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous areas – 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 background, a industrial site was ablaze, dark smoke curling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to follow them.

During those days, feelings moved through the city like weather: swift terror, unease, righteous anger at the unfairness, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick searches and materials that translation demands.

Outside, concussive forces blew windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the belongings lay ruined, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, working at an easel, refusing to let quiet and dirt have the ultimate victory.

Translating Grief

A image spread on social media of a 23-year-old writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an elderly woman hurrying between alleys, yelling a name. People said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried memory. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: transforming ruin into image, death into poetry, grief into quest.

The Craft as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst devastation, I found myself rendering 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 profound meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet persisted producing until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all longed for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than literary craft: it was an act of perseverance, of holding one's ground, of persisting.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his confinement, asking for more books, 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 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, scarred but surviving, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, 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 anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – 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 complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a subtle, stubborn rejection to vanish.