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

Among the rubble of a fallen apartment block, a solitary vision remained with me: a volume I had converted from the English language to Persian, sitting half-buried in dirt and soot. Its cover was shredded and smudged, its pages bent and singed, but it was still readable. Still communicating.

An Urban Center Under Assault

Two days prior, missiles started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, violent blasts. The web was totally severed. I was in my residence, working on a work about what it means to transport language across tongues, and the morals and worries of taking on another’s perspective. As edifices collapsed, I sat revising a text that contended, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything stopped. A project my publisher had been about to publish was stuck when the printing house ceased operations. Shops locked their doors one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, filled with lexicons, rare books I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Distance and Devastation

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be safer locations – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a photo: in the background, a factory was ablaze, black smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and danger seemed to pursue them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like weather: swift dread, unease, righteous anger at the wrong, then apathy. Beyond the emotional toll, the attack eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and sources that the craft demands.

Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their casings; at a family member's house, every pane was shattered, the possessions lay broken, objects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an easel, refusing to let silence and dirt have the ultimate victory.

Converting Pain

A picture was shared on social media of a young artist who was died when missiles struck a building. Her poem went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an elderly woman hurrying between alleys, calling a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some repressed remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: transforming destruction into picture, demise into lines, sorrow into search.

Translation as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by ruin, I found myself working on a fable about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet kept working until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond a skill: it was an act of resistance, of staying put, of enduring.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his confinement, asking for more resources, insisting that language study become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, hope, practice, support, and symbol” all at once.

A Marked Voice

And then came the picture. I saw it on a news site and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, damaged but intact, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, drained of life among the rubble and ruins. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but enduring.

I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a act with consequences”, but I had never felt the full weight of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else disappears. It is a persistent, determined declination to be silenced.