Among those Ruined Debris of an Residential Building, I Found a Volume I Had Rendered

In the wreckage of a destroyed apartment block, a solitary vision remained with me: a volume I had translated from English to Persian, lying partially covered in dust and ash. Its front was shredded and dirtied, its leaves curled and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating.

A Metropolis During Attack

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 apartment, rendering a book about what it means to transport text across tongues, and the morals and worries of inhabiting another’s narrative. As buildings collapsed, I sat polishing a text that contended, in its understated way, for the endurance of purpose.

Everything halted. A project my publisher had been about to go to print was stuck when the printing house closed. Bookstores locked their doors one by one. One night, when the booms were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the bookshelves in my apartment, filled with reference books, valuable volumes I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Dispersal and Loss

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous towns – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a industrial site was on fire, black smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly somewhere else, and danger seemed to chase them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like a front: swift fear, unease, indignation at the wrong, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the attack eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate queries and references that the craft demands.

Outside, shockwaves ripped windows from their sashes; at a family member's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the belongings lay broken, personal effects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, painting at an stand, declining to let silence and dust have the last word.

Translating Sorrow

A picture circulated digitally of a 23-year-old writer who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her poem went spread rapidly alongside her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an aged woman running between alleys, yelling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some buried memory. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: changing devastation into art, demise into verse, mourning into quest.

The Work as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of ruin, I found myself translating 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 working until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all desired – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than an art form: it was an act of perseverance, of remaining, of enduring.

One day, in bright 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, hope, discipline, support, and metaphor” all at once.

A Marked Voice

And then came the photograph. I spotted it on a website and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, scarred but surviving, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, drained of life among the debris and debris. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but persisting.

I stared 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 mattered”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, determined declination to disappear.