Amid those Devastated Debris of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Volume I’d Rendered

Among the wreckage of a destroyed apartment block, a single sight remained with me: a tome I had converted from English to Persian, sitting partly concealed in dust and ash. Its cover was shredded and stained, its sheets curled and singed, but it was still readable. Still uttering words.

A Metropolis Under Attack

Two days before, missiles commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just sudden, forceful blasts. The internet was completely cut off. I was in my flat, rendering a work about what it means to carry text across tongues, and the ethics and worries of taking on a different voice. As structures came down, I sat revising a text that contended, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything stopped. A project my publisher had been about to publish was stranded when the facility closed. Retailers locked their doors one by one. One night, when the explosions were too imminent, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, stocked with lexicons, rare editions I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Dispersal and Loss

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure towns – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a picture: in the faraway, a plant was burning, thick smoke curling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to pursue them.

During those days, moods passed over the city like a storm: swift dread, apprehension, indignation at the wrong, then detachment. Beyond the emotional toll, the shelling destroyed my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant look-ups and materials that the work demands.

Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their frames; at a relative's house, every sheet of glass was destroyed, the possessions lay damaged, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, creating at an stand, declining to let stillness and dust have the ultimate victory.

Converting Grief

A image was shared digitally of a 23-year-old writer who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went spread rapidly alongside her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an aged woman running between alleys, shouting a name. Neighbours said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some repressed memory. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: changing destruction into image, demise into poetry, sorrow into search.

The Work as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself translating a fable about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can possess 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 aiming at the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond an art form: it was an act of defiance, of staying put, of persisting.

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

An Enduring Voice

And then came the photograph. I spotted it on a news site and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, marked but surviving, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been black and white, devoid of life among the debris and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made visible – scarred, but enduring.

I stared at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a political act”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice was important”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else crumbles. It is a persistent, unyielding refusal to be silenced.