Within those Devastated Remains of an Apartment Block, I Found a Volume I Had Rendered

Among the debris of a collapsed structure, a particular sight lingered with me: a volume I had converted from English to Persian, sitting partially covered in dirt and soot. Its front was torn and smudged, its leaves curled and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking.

An Urban Center Amid Bombardment

Two days before, rockets began striking the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, violent explosions. The digital network was completely disconnected. I was in my flat, translating a work about what it means to carry language across languages, and the morals and concerns of occupying a different perspective. As edifices collapsed, I sat polishing a text that contended, in its understated way, for the persistence of meaning.

Everything stopped. A manuscript my publisher had been about to send to press was stuck when the facility ceased operations. Shops shut one by one. One night, when the booms were too nearby, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop worrying about the bookshelves in my apartment, stocked with lexicons, valuable volumes 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 make it through the night.

Distance and Grief

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be safer towns – places that, days later, were also struck. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a photo: in the faraway, a factory was ablaze, dark smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and danger seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions passed over the city like a front: swift fear, apprehension, moral outrage at the unfairness, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick queries and sources that translation demands.

Outside, blast waves blew windows from their casings; at a family member's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the furniture lay damaged, personal effects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, creating at an easel, choosing not to let stillness and debris have the ultimate victory.

Transforming Sorrow

A picture was shared digitally of a 23-year-old poet who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared with her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman hurrying between alleys, calling a name. Locals said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some buried remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: transforming devastation into art, demise into poetry, mourning into quest.

The Work 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 recover only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet continued producing until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all longed for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something greater than literary craft: it was an act of defiance, of holding one's ground, of persisting.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that linguistic work become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, aspiration, discipline, foundation, and analogy” all at once.

An Enduring Legacy

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

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 true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else crumbles. It is a subtle, unyielding refusal to disappear.