Amid those Ruined Remains of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Volume I Had Rendered

In the rubble of a fallen structure, a solitary vision lingered with me: a volume I had translated from English to Persian, sitting half-buried in dirt and soot. Its cover was shredded and dirtied, its leaves curled and singed, but it was still legible. Still uttering words.

A City Under Assault

Two days before, missiles started hitting the city. There were no sirens, just sudden, violent detonations. The internet was entirely disconnected. I was in my flat, rendering a work about what it means to carry words across languages, and the ethics and worries of inhabiting another’s narrative. As edifices came down, I sat editing a text that argued, in its quiet way, for the persistence of purpose.

Everything ceased. A book my publishing house had been about to send to press was halted when the facility ceased operations. Bookstores closed one by one. One night, when the explosions were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, stocked with lexicons, valuable editions I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That library was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Dispersal and Loss

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous locations – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a picture: in the faraway, a factory was on fire, black smoke coiling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and danger seemed to chase them.

During those days, feelings swept through the city like weather: sudden fear, anxiety, moral outrage at the injustice, then detachment. Beyond the emotional toll, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick queries and sources that translation demands.

Outside, concussive forces blew windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was destroyed, the furniture lay ruined, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, working at an easel, declining to let quiet and dirt have the final say.

Translating Grief

A photograph circulated digitally 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 books, I saw an aged woman hurrying between alleys, calling a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some deep-seated memory. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: changing ruin into image, loss into lines, sorrow into longing.

The Work as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself translating a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted working until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all yearned for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than an art form: it was an act of defiance, of holding one's ground, of holding on.

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his prison cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that language study become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, aspiration, rigor, anchor, and metaphor” all at once.

A Scarred Work

And then came the picture. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, scarred but surviving, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been black and white, drained of life among the debris and debris. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but surviving.

I stared 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 endure when everything else disappears. It is a persistent, unyielding rejection to be silenced.