Within the Devastated Debris of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Volume I Had Translated

In the rubble of a destroyed apartment block, a single sight lingered with me: a volume I had converted from English to Farsi, lying partially covered in dust and ash. Its cover was shredded and smudged, its leaves bent and burned, but it was still readable. Still speaking.

A City During Attack

Two days prior, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, forceful explosions. The internet was entirely cut off. I was in my residence, working on a text about what it means to carry text across languages, and the principles and worries of taking on another’s voice. As edifices collapsed, I sat revising a text that contended, in its understated way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything stopped. A book my publisher had been about to send to press was halted when the printing house shut down. Shops locked their doors one by one. One night, when the booms were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the shelter. I couldn’t stop worrying about the bookshelves in my apartment, stocked with lexicons, valuable books I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever worked on. That library was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would endure the night.

Dispersal and Grief

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be safer areas – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a photo: in the faraway, a factory was ablaze, thick smoke spiraling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and threat seemed to follow them.

During those days, moods moved through the city like a front: swift fear, apprehension, indignation at the unfairness, then detachment. Beyond the personal impact, the attack dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick searches and materials that the work demands.

Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their casings; at a family member's house, every window was shattered, the belongings lay ruined, personal effects spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, painting at an stand, refusing to let stillness and debris have the final say.

Converting Grief

A picture spread online of a 23-year-old writer who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an elderly woman dashing between alleys, yelling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some repressed remembrance. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: changing devastation into picture, loss into lines, grief into search.

Translation as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, 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 deep meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet continued producing until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the peace we all desired – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth striving for.

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

One day, in bright sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader 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 truth, hope, discipline, support, and symbol” all at once.

A Marked Legacy

And then came the photograph. I noticed it on a news site and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, marked but whole, my name displayed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been black and white, stripped of life among the concrete and debris. For most of my career, I had been anonymous, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but surviving.

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 attack, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to haul stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else disappears. It is a quiet, determined refusal to be silenced.