Within those Devastated Debris of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Volume I’d Rendered

In the rubble of a collapsed building, a particular sight remained with me: a tome I had translated from English to Persian, lying half-buried in dust and ash. Its cover was shredded and smudged, its pages curled and singed, but it was still legible. Still speaking.

A City During Bombardment

Two days before, rockets began striking the city. There were no sirens, just sudden, violent explosions. The internet was entirely cut off. I was in my residence, translating a book about what it means to carry language across cultures, and the principles and worries of occupying a different narrative. As buildings collapsed, I sat revising a text that argued, in its quiet way, for the endurance of meaning.

Everything halted. A project my publisher had been about to go to print was stranded when the printing house shut down. Shops closed one by one. One night, when the blasts were too nearby, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop worrying about the bookshelves in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, rare books I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That collection 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 less dangerous areas – 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 plant was on fire, black smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and threat seemed to pursue them.

During those days, feelings moved through the city like weather: swift dread, unease, moral outrage at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate queries and materials that the work demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their casings; at a relative's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the belongings lay damaged, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, working at an stand, refusing to let quiet and dust have the ultimate victory.

Transforming Sorrow

A picture spread digitally of a young writer who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her poem went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an aged woman running between passages, shouting a name. People said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some repressed memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: turning ruin into picture, demise into lines, mourning into search.

The Work as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst ruin, I found myself working on a children’s tale 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 experienced the loss of 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 reaching toward.

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

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his cell, asking for more books, insisting that linguistic work become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, goal, discipline, foundation, and metaphor” all at once.

A Scarred Work

And then came the image. I spotted it on a website and saw that, within 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 monochrome, stripped 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 visible – scarred, but surviving.

I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a political act”, but I had never felt the full weight 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 disappears. It is a quiet, stubborn refusal to be silenced.