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

Among the rubble of a fallen building, a single image lingered with me: a volume I had translated from English to Persian, sitting partially covered in dirt and soot. Its cover was shredded and dirtied, its sheets curled and burned, but it was still readable. Still communicating.

An Urban Center Under Bombardment

Two days before, rockets commenced attacking the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, powerful detonations. The web was completely severed. I was in my apartment, working on a book about what it means to move words across tongues, and the principles and concerns of taking on a different perspective. As buildings fell, I sat revising a text that contended, in its quiet way, for the persistence of meaning.

Everything halted. A project my publishing house had been about to go to print was stranded when the printer closed. Shops shut one by one. One night, when the booms were too nearby, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the bookshelves in my apartment, stocked with dictionaries, rare editions I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Distance and Grief

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous locations – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a factory was on fire, black smoke curling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and peril seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods moved through the city like a storm: instant fear, apprehension, righteous anger at the injustice, then apathy. Beyond the emotional toll, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the instant queries and sources that translation demands.

Outside, blast waves blew windows from their sashes; at a relative's house, every window was shattered, the belongings lay ruined, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, working at an stand, declining to let quiet and dirt have the ultimate victory.

Translating Grief

A photograph spread on social media of a young artist who was died when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral with her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an older woman dashing between passages, calling a name. People said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some buried remembrance. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: turning ruin into image, loss into verse, grief into search.

The Work as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of ruin, I found myself translating a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will get better only if she can grasp the moon. Though written for children, it carried significant meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet kept creating until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all longed for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth pursuing.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than a skill: it was an act of defiance, of staying put, of enduring.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a facility; 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 “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, goal, practice, support, and analogy” all at once.

A Scarred Legacy

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 renditions, damaged but surviving, 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 concrete and debris. 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 statement”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice mattered”. 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 persistent, determined refusal to vanish.