Among those Devastated Debris of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Volume I’d Translated

Among the wreckage of a collapsed structure, a single image remained with me: a volume I had converted from English to Persian, lying half-buried in dust and ash. Its cover was ripped and dirtied, its leaves curled and scorched, but it was still decipherable. Still uttering words.

A City Amid Assault

Two days earlier, missiles began striking the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, powerful blasts. The internet was entirely severed. I was in my residence, rendering a book about what it means to move language across languages, and the principles and worries of inhabiting someone else's perspective. As structures came down, I sat polishing a text that argued, in its subtle way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything stopped. A project my publisher had been about to go to print was stuck when the printer closed. Retailers shut one by one. One night, when the blasts were too imminent, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the library in my apartment, stocked with lexicons, rare books I had spent years accumulating 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 Devastation

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous areas – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a photo: in the faraway, a industrial site was on fire, dark smoke coiling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly far away, and peril seemed to pursue them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like weather: instant dread, anxiety, moral outrage at the injustice, then detachment. Beyond the psychological cost, the shelling eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick look-ups and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their frames; at a cousin's house, every pane was shattered, the belongings lay damaged, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, painting at an stand, refusing to let quiet and debris have the final say.

Translating Sorrow

A picture was shared digitally of a young artist who was died when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an elderly woman running between alleyways, shouting a name. People said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some repressed recollection. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: transforming devastation into image, loss into lines, mourning into quest.

Translation as Defiance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst devastation, I found myself rendering a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet kept producing until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unattainable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all longed for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth striving for.

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

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his prison cell, asking for more resources, insisting that language study become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, hope, discipline, anchor, and symbol” all at once.

An Enduring Legacy

And then came the picture. I saw it on a website and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, scarred but whole, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, stripped of life among the debris and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – 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 had significance”. It will not be obliterated. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else falls away. It is a quiet, stubborn declination to disappear.