Amid the Ruined Remains of an Apartment Block, I Found a Volume I Had Rendered

In the rubble of a fallen apartment block, a solitary vision lingered with me: a tome I had converted from English to Persian, resting partially covered in dirt and soot. Its cover was torn and smudged, its pages bent and singed, but it was still legible. Still speaking.

A City During Assault

Two days earlier, missiles began striking the city. There were no sirens, just unexpected, powerful detonations. The digital network was totally cut off. I was in my residence, translating a text about what it means to move language across tongues, and the ethics and anxieties of taking on a different perspective. As structures collapsed, I sat polishing a text that argued, in its quiet way, for the persistence of purpose.

Everything halted. A project my publisher had been about to go to print was halted when the facility closed. Bookstores closed one by one. One night, when the booms were too close, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop thinking about the library in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, valuable editions I had spent years gathering 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 make it through the night.

Separation and Loss

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous areas – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a picture: in the distance, a industrial site was burning, dark smoke spiraling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods moved through the city like weather: instant terror, anxiety, righteous anger at the injustice, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant searches and sources that the work demands.

Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their casings; at a relative's house, every sheet of glass was shattered, the furniture lay damaged, objects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, painting at an stand, refusing to let stillness and dirt have the last word.

Converting Sorrow

A picture circulated on social media 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 elderly woman dashing between passages, calling a name. People said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some repressed memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: turning ruin into image, death into verse, mourning into quest.

The Craft as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself working on a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant 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 impossible. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all yearned for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than literary craft: it was an act of defiance, of remaining, of holding on.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his prison cell, asking for more books, insisting that translation become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, goal, discipline, support, 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 translations, damaged but intact, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, devoid 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 visible – scarred, but persisting.

I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, stubborn declination to vanish.