Amid those Ruined Debris of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Book I’d Rendered

Within the wreckage of a fallen structure, a single sight lingered with me: a tome I had translated from English to Persian, resting half-buried in dirt and ash. Its jacket was torn and stained, its sheets bent and singed, but it was still legible. Still uttering words.

A Metropolis Amid Attack

Two days earlier, missiles began striking the city. There were no sirens, just sudden, forceful blasts. The digital network was totally disconnected. I was in my residence, translating a book about what it means to carry text across tongues, and the principles and concerns of occupying a different perspective. As structures fell, I sat revising a text that contended, in its understated way, for the endurance of meaning.

Everything ceased. A book my publisher had been about to send to press was stranded when the facility shut down. Retailers shut one by one. One night, when the explosions were too nearby, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop thinking about the shelves in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, rare volumes I had spent years accumulating 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.

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 departed to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a plant was on fire, black smoke curling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly far away, and danger seemed to pursue them.

During those days, moods moved through the city like a storm: instant fear, anxiety, moral outrage at the wrong, then apathy. Beyond the emotional toll, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and references that the work demands.

Outside, shockwaves ripped windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the furniture lay ruined, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, creating at an easel, declining to let silence and dirt have the ultimate victory.

Transforming Sorrow

A picture was shared digitally of a 23-year-old artist who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral alongside her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an elderly woman running between alleyways, yelling a name. People said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some deep-seated memory. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: changing destruction into art, demise into verse, sorrow into search.

The Craft as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself translating a fable about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of 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 tranquility we all desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than a skill: it was an act of resistance, of holding one's ground, of holding on.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his prison cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that linguistic work become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, goal, practice, anchor, and symbol” all at once.

A Marked Voice

And then came the picture. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old renditions, marked but intact, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been devoid of color, devoid of life among the concrete and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been invisible, 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 act with consequences”, but I had never felt the full weight of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else falls away. It is a persistent, unyielding declination to disappear.