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

Within the wreckage of a collapsed apartment block, a solitary image lingered with me: a volume I had converted from English to Persian, resting partly concealed in dust and ash. Its front was shredded and smudged, its leaves curled and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still uttering words.

A Metropolis Amid Attack

Two days earlier, rockets started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just sudden, forceful explosions. The web was completely severed. I was in my apartment, rendering a text about what it means to move words across tongues, and the ethics and anxieties of occupying another’s perspective. As structures fell, I sat revising a text that contended, in its understated way, for the lasting nature of significance.

Everything stopped. A book my publisher had been about to send to press was stuck when the printing house closed. Shops locked their doors one by one. One night, when the explosions were too close, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop worrying about the library in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, valuable editions I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Separation and Loss

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure locations – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the distance, a factory was on fire, thick smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to chase them.

During those days, emotions moved through the city like weather: sudden terror, unease, indignation at the unfairness, then apathy. Beyond the personal impact, the bombardment 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, blast waves tore windows from their casings; at a relative's house, every pane was destroyed, the possessions lay ruined, objects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, creating at an stand, declining to let silence and debris have the final say.

Converting Grief

A picture was shared online of a young writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went was widely shared with her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an aged woman running 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 repressed recollection. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: transforming destruction into image, loss into verse, sorrow into search.

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst destruction, I found myself rendering a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will heal 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 producing until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth pursuing.

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

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his prison cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that translation become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, goal, practice, foundation, and analogy” all at once.

A Marked Work

And then came the photograph. I noticed it on a website and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, marked but whole, 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 debris and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but surviving.

I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a political act”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, determined declination to vanish.