Among those Devastated Debris of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Volume I’d Translated

Within the rubble of a collapsed building, a single sight lingered with me: a book I had converted from the English language to Persian, sitting partly concealed in dust and soot. Its front was shredded and smudged, its sheets curled and singed, but it was still readable. Still speaking.

A Metropolis Under Assault

Two days before, missiles commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, violent explosions. The digital network was entirely cut off. I was in my flat, working on a text about what it means to carry words across cultures, and the principles and anxieties of inhabiting someone else's perspective. As edifices came down, I sat revising a text that contended, in its quiet way, for the persistence of purpose.

Everything stopped. A book my publisher had been about to publish was stranded when the printer closed. Retailers locked their doors one by one. One night, when the booms were too nearby, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, stocked with reference books, rare editions I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Dispersal and Grief

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous areas – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a picture: in the background, a factory was on fire, thick smoke coiling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like a front: instant terror, apprehension, indignation at the wrong, then apathy. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate searches and references that the work demands.

Outside, blast waves tore windows from their frames; at a family member's house, every sheet of glass was destroyed, the furniture lay ruined, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, creating at an easel, choosing not to let silence and debris have the ultimate victory.

Translating Sorrow

A picture circulated digitally of a young writer who was died when missiles struck a building. Her poem went spread rapidly with her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an elderly woman dashing between alleyways, calling a name. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some buried memory. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: turning ruin into image, loss into lines, sorrow into quest.

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of devastation, I found myself translating 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 deep meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet continued producing until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all yearned for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth striving for.

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 broad sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his cell, asking for more resources, insisting that linguistic work become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, goal, discipline, support, and metaphor” all at once.

A Scarred Legacy

And then came the image. I saw it on a website and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, scarred but surviving, my name printed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, drained of life among the concrete and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – scarred, but surviving.

I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else falls away. It is a persistent, determined declination to be silenced.