Within those Devastated Debris of an Apartment Block, I Found a Volume I’d Translated

Among the debris of a destroyed apartment block, a particular vision stayed with me: a book I had translated from the English language to Persian, sitting partly concealed in dust and ash. Its cover was shredded and dirtied, its leaves curled and scorched, but it was still readable. Still communicating.

A City Under Assault

Two days before, rockets began striking the city. There were no alarms, just sudden, powerful detonations. The web was completely disconnected. I was in my apartment, translating a work about what it means to move text across tongues, and the principles and concerns of taking on a different narrative. As structures came down, I sat editing a text that contended, in its quiet way, for the persistence of meaning.

Everything halted. A project my publishing house had been about to publish was halted when the printer shut down. Retailers closed one by one. One night, when the explosions were too imminent, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the bookshelves in my apartment, stocked with lexicons, valuable books I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Dispersal and Devastation

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous locations – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a image: in the background, a industrial site was on fire, black smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods passed over the city like a front: sudden terror, unease, righteous anger at the wrong, then numbness. Beyond the psychological cost, the bombardment eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and materials that translation demands.

Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their casings; at a relative's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the furniture lay broken, objects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, painting at an stand, refusing to let stillness and dirt have the final say.

Translating Grief

A image was shared digitally of a young writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her poem went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an older woman hurrying between passages, yelling a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some deep-seated memory. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: turning destruction into art, death into poetry, sorrow into search.

The Craft as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of destruction, I found myself working on a fable about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet persisted creating until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all yearned for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth striving for.

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

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

A Marked Voice

And then came the picture. I noticed it on a news site and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, scarred but surviving, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, devoid of life among the rubble and debris. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but persisting.

I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a act with consequences”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else disappears. It is a subtle, stubborn refusal to be silenced.