Within those Ruined Remains of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Volume I’d Translated

Within the wreckage of a fallen building, a solitary image remained with me: a volume I had converted from English to Persian, lying half-buried in dirt and soot. Its front was shredded and dirtied, its pages curled and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking.

An Urban Center Amid Attack

Two days before, projectiles began striking the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, violent detonations. The digital network was entirely severed. I was in my apartment, translating a book about what it means to transport words across languages, and the morals and worries of inhabiting another’s narrative. As buildings fell, I sat revising a text that contended, in its understated way, for the endurance of purpose.

Everything halted. A book my publishing house had been about to go to print was stranded when the printing house shut down. Retailers shut one by one. One night, when the booms were too nearby, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop worrying about the shelves in my apartment, stocked with lexicons, valuable volumes I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Distance and Grief

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be safer locations – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a picture: in the faraway, a plant was ablaze, dark smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and danger seemed to chase them.

During those days, emotions passed over the city like weather: sudden fear, unease, moral outrage at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the emotional toll, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, blast waves ripped windows from their frames; at a relative's house, every window was shattered, the possessions lay broken, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, painting at an stand, refusing to let silence and debris have the last word.

Transforming Sorrow

A image spread on social media of a 23-year-old poet who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman running between passages, calling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some repressed recollection. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: turning destruction into art, demise into lines, sorrow into quest.

The Work as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst devastation, 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 significant meaning for me then. The author, who lost 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 calm we all desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than literary craft: it was an act of resistance, of remaining, of persisting.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his confinement, asking for more books, insisting that language study become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, hope, rigor, support, and analogy” all at once.

A Scarred Voice

And then came the picture. I spotted it on a website and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, damaged but intact, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, drained of life among the debris and ruins. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – 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 full weight of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else crumbles. It is a subtle, determined refusal to be silenced.