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

Among the debris of a collapsed structure, a particular vision remained with me: a tome I had translated from English to Persian, sitting partially covered in dust and soot. Its jacket was ripped and smudged, its pages curled and scorched, but it was still legible. Still communicating.

An Urban Center Amid Attack

Two days earlier, rockets began striking the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, violent blasts. The internet was completely severed. I was in my residence, rendering a work about what it means to carry language across languages, and the morals and concerns of occupying a different voice. As structures collapsed, I sat editing a text that suggested, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of significance.

Everything stopped. A project my publisher had been about to send to press was stranded when the facility ceased operations. Retailers closed one by one. One night, when the booms were too close, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop thinking about the shelves in my apartment, filled with dictionaries, hard-to-find books I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Dispersal and Loss

My companion 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 departing, she sent me a picture: in the faraway, a factory was burning, dark smoke coiling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly somewhere else, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like a storm: sudden terror, anxiety, moral outrage at the unfairness, then detachment. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate searches and sources that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces ripped windows from their sashes; at a family member's house, every pane was shattered, the belongings lay broken, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, working at an stand, choosing not to let stillness and debris have the last word.

Converting Sorrow

A picture was shared online of a young poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an older woman hurrying between passages, yelling a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some deep-seated memory. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

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

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst destruction, I found myself working on 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 kept producing until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all longed for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond literary craft: it was an act of resistance, of staying put, of persisting.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that language study become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, aspiration, rigor, support, and analogy” all at once.

An Enduring Work

And then came the picture. I saw it on a news site and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, scarred but intact, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been black and white, 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 apparent – scarred, but enduring.

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 true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, stubborn declination to be silenced.