Amid the Ruined Debris of an Apartment Block, I Found a Volume I’d Rendered

In the wreckage of a fallen structure, a single vision remained with me: a tome I had rendered from English to Farsi, sitting partly concealed in dust and soot. Its front was ripped and dirtied, its pages bent and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking.

A Metropolis Under Attack

Two days prior, missiles started hitting the city. There were no sirens, just sudden, powerful detonations. The web was completely disconnected. I was in my apartment, translating a text about what it means to carry language across tongues, and the morals and concerns of inhabiting someone else's voice. As structures fell, I sat revising a text that contended, in its quiet way, for the lasting nature of purpose.

Everything ceased. A manuscript my publishing house had been about to publish was stuck when the facility ceased operations. Bookstores locked their doors one by one. One night, when the explosions were too imminent, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop worrying about the bookshelves in my apartment, filled with dictionaries, rare books I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever worked on. That library was my lifework, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would survive the night.

Separation and Loss

My partner left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure towns – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was leaving, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a factory was burning, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and threat seemed to chase them.

During those days, feelings swept through the city like a storm: instant dread, unease, indignation at the injustice, then detachment. Beyond the emotional toll, the bombardment dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate look-ups and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, blast waves blew windows from their sashes; at a relative's house, every pane was broken, the possessions lay ruined, objects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, creating at an easel, choosing not to let stillness and dirt have the ultimate victory.

Transforming Sorrow

A photograph was shared online of a young poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her poem went was widely shared next to her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an elderly woman dashing between alleys, calling a name. People said she had lost a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some deep-seated memory. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

We were all converting, in our own way: changing destruction into art, loss into verse, grief into quest.

The Craft as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst destruction, I found myself working on 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 profound meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet continued producing until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something beyond literary craft: 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 leader in his prison cell, asking for more books, insisting that language study become his “primary activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a truth, aspiration, practice, anchor, and symbol” all at once.

A Scarred Work

And then came the picture. I spotted it on a platform and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, marked but intact, my name printed 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 debris. For most of my career, I had been unseen, 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 full weight of this until then. To translate, even under attack, was to say: “this voice had significance”. It will not be erased. To translate is not just to carry stories across languages, but to help them persist when everything else disappears. It is a subtle, stubborn rejection to be silenced.