Amid those Ruined Remains of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Volume I Had Rendered

Within the wreckage of a destroyed apartment block, a single sight remained with me: a book I had translated from English to Farsi, resting half-buried in dirt and ash. Its jacket was torn and stained, its sheets curled and burned, but it was still legible. Still uttering words.

A Metropolis During Assault

Two days prior, missiles commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, forceful explosions. The web was completely severed. I was in my flat, translating a text about what it means to carry language across languages, and the principles and concerns of inhabiting someone else's voice. As structures collapsed, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything stopped. A project my publishing house had been about to go to print was stranded when the printer ceased operations. Bookstores locked their doors one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop worrying about the bookshelves in my apartment, filled with reference books, valuable editions I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That library was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Separation and Grief

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure areas – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the background, a plant was ablaze, black smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods passed over the city like a front: sudden dread, unease, indignation at the injustice, then detachment. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and sources that the work demands.

Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their casings; at a relative's house, every window was shattered, the possessions lay damaged, household items scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, creating at an easel, refusing to let quiet and debris have the ultimate victory.

Transforming Sorrow

A image circulated digitally of a young writer who was died when missiles struck a building. Her poem went viral with her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an elderly woman running between alleyways, yelling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some buried memory. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: transforming destruction into picture, death into poetry, sorrow into quest.

Translation as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of destruction, I found myself working on a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet kept working until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all yearned for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than an art form: it was an act of perseverance, of staying put, of persisting.

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 dictionaries, insisting that linguistic work become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, goal, practice, support, and symbol” all at once.

A Marked Voice

And then came the image. I saw it on a platform and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, damaged but intact, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been devoid of color, drained of life among the rubble and debris. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, 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 act with consequences”, but I had never felt the full weight of this until then. To translate, even under fire, 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 crumbles. It is a subtle, unyielding rejection to be silenced.