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

In the wreckage of a destroyed apartment block, a particular vision lingered with me: a tome I had rendered from the English language to Farsi, lying partly concealed in dust and ash. Its cover was ripped and stained, its pages curled and scorched, but it was still decipherable. Still uttering words.

An Urban Center Amid Attack

Two days prior, projectiles began striking the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, powerful explosions. The web was completely cut off. I was in my flat, rendering a book about what it means to move words across languages, and the ethics and concerns of occupying someone else's voice. As buildings came down, I sat revising a text that contended, in its quiet way, for the persistence of meaning.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to send to press was stranded when the printing house shut down. Shops closed one by one. One night, when the booms were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, holding lexicons, rare volumes I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Dispersal and Devastation

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be safer areas – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a photo: in the faraway, a plant was on fire, thick smoke spiraling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods passed over the city like weather: sudden dread, unease, righteous anger at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate queries and sources that the work demands.

Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their casings; at a family member's house, every sheet of glass was destroyed, the possessions lay damaged, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, painting at an easel, choosing not to let stillness and dust have the last word.

Converting Pain

A photograph was shared online of a young poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral with her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman dashing between passages, calling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

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

The Work as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst ruin, I found myself translating a fable about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet continued producing until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all desired – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than an art form: it was an act of perseverance, of staying put, of persisting.

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

A Scarred Legacy

And then came the image. I noticed it on a website and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, marked but intact, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been devoid of color, drained 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 visible – scarred, but enduring.

I looked 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 obliterated. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, determined declination to be silenced.