Amid the Devastated Remains of an Apartment Block, I Found a Volume I Had Translated

Within the rubble of a collapsed apartment block, a particular image lingered with me: a volume I had translated from English to Persian, resting partially covered in dirt and ash. Its front was torn and smudged, its sheets curled and singed, but it was still legible. Still communicating.

An Urban Center During Assault

Two days prior, projectiles began striking the city. There were no alarms, just sudden, powerful blasts. The digital network was totally cut off. I was in my apartment, working on a book about what it means to carry language across cultures, and the principles and anxieties of inhabiting someone else's narrative. As buildings came down, I sat editing a text that contended, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of meaning.

Everything halted. A project my publisher had been about to publish was stranded when the facility closed. Shops shut one by one. One night, when the explosions were too close, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop thinking about the library in my apartment, filled with reference books, valuable editions I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Separation and Grief

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous 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 photo: in the faraway, a factory was on fire, thick smoke curling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly far away, and threat seemed to pursue them.

During those days, moods swept through the city like a storm: sudden dread, apprehension, righteous anger at the unfairness, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling eradicated my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the immediate searches and sources that the work demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every pane was shattered, the belongings lay broken, objects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, creating at an stand, declining to let quiet and dust have the last word.

Converting Pain

A photograph spread online of a 23-year-old artist who was died when missiles struck a building. Her writing went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an elderly woman dashing between passages, calling a name. People said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some repressed memory. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all transforming, in our own way: changing destruction into picture, demise into poetry, grief into quest.

The Work as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by ruin, I found myself translating a fable about a king whose daughter will get better 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 kept working until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all desired – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth reaching toward.

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 prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a political thinker in his confinement, asking for more books, insisting that language study become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, aspiration, rigor, foundation, and symbol” all at once.

An Enduring Work

And then came the image. I spotted it on a platform and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, damaged but whole, my name printed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been monochrome, devoid of life among the concrete and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, 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 act with consequences”, 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 forgotten. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else crumbles. It is a subtle, unyielding declination to vanish.