Among those Ruined Debris of an Apartment Block, I Found a Volume I’d Rendered

Within the debris of a collapsed structure, a particular vision lingered with me: a book I had translated from the English language to Persian, resting half-buried in dust and ash. Its front was torn and dirtied, its sheets curled and burned, but it was still legible. Still communicating.

A City During Attack

Two days earlier, rockets started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, forceful detonations. The web was totally severed. I was in my apartment, working on a work about what it means to transport text across cultures, and the morals and anxieties of occupying a different voice. As edifices collapsed, I sat polishing a text that argued, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything stopped. A book my publishing house had been about to go to print was stranded when the facility closed. Shops shut one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the bookshelves in my apartment, filled with lexicons, hard-to-find books 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 make it through the night.

Separation and Loss

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous areas – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the distance, a plant was ablaze, thick smoke coiling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly somewhere else, and peril seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions moved through the city like a storm: instant fear, apprehension, righteous anger at the wrong, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate searches and materials that translation demands.

Outside, blast waves blew windows from their sashes; at a family member's house, every pane was destroyed, the possessions lay damaged, objects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an stand, refusing to let silence and dust have the ultimate victory.

Transforming Pain

A picture circulated on social media of a 23-year-old writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her writing went spread rapidly alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an elderly woman dashing between alleyways, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some repressed remembrance. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: turning destruction into picture, loss into lines, grief into quest.

The Work as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of devastation, I found myself working on a children’s tale 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 experienced the loss of his sight yet continued working until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all longed for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth reaching toward.

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

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

A Marked Legacy

And then came the image. I noticed it on a news site and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, marked but whole, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, devoid of life among the debris and ruins. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but persisting.

I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the full weight of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else falls away. It is a persistent, determined rejection to disappear.