Among the Devastated Debris of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Volume I Had Rendered

In the debris of a destroyed structure, a solitary vision stayed with me: a volume I had translated from English to Farsi, resting partly concealed in dust and ash. Its cover was ripped and smudged, its leaves bent and singed, but it was still readable. Still uttering words.

A City Amid Bombardment

Two days before, missiles began striking the city. There were no sirens, just sudden, violent detonations. The internet was totally cut off. I was in my flat, translating a book about what it means to move text across languages, and the ethics and worries of inhabiting another’s perspective. As structures fell, I sat editing a text that suggested, in its subtle way, for the endurance of purpose.

Everything stopped. A book my publishing house had been about to go to print was stranded when the printer shut down. Bookstores shut one by one. One night, when the explosions were too imminent, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the shelves in my apartment, holding lexicons, valuable books I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That collection was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure 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 hit. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a photo: in the distance, a factory was burning, thick smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and danger seemed to pursue them.

During those days, moods passed over the city like a front: instant terror, anxiety, righteous anger at the unfairness, then detachment. Beyond the emotional toll, the attack destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and materials that the work demands.

Outside, concussive forces blew windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every window was broken, the possessions lay ruined, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, creating at an easel, declining to let quiet and dust have the last word.

Transforming Sorrow

A photograph spread online of a young writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her poem went was widely shared alongside her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an older woman hurrying between passages, yelling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some repressed recollection. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: transforming destruction into picture, loss into lines, mourning into longing.

Translation as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst destruction, I found myself rendering 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 experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted working until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth pursuing.

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

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his prison cell, asking for more dictionaries, insisting that linguistic work become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, hope, rigor, support, and metaphor” all at once.

A Scarred Voice

And then came the photograph. I saw it on a platform and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, damaged but whole, my name shown on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, devoid of life among the concrete and debris. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but surviving.

I gazed upon 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 mattered”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them remain when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, determined declination to vanish.