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

Among the wreckage of a fallen building, a solitary vision lingered with me: a book I had translated from English to Persian, resting half-buried in dirt and ash. Its jacket was shredded and smudged, its leaves bent and singed, but it was still legible. Still communicating.

A Metropolis Amid Bombardment

Two days before, rockets started hitting the city. There were no sirens, just abrupt, forceful explosions. The digital network was entirely cut off. I was in my apartment, working on a work about what it means to carry language across languages, and the principles and concerns of taking on a different voice. As buildings came down, I sat revising a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything ceased. A book my publishing house had been about to go to print was stranded when the printer closed. Shops locked their doors one by one. One night, when the booms were too close, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop thinking about the bookshelves in my apartment, filled with lexicons, valuable 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 survive the night.

Distance and Grief

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be less dangerous towns – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter went to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a factory was ablaze, black smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and peril seemed to chase them.

During those days, emotions swept through the city like a front: sudden dread, anxiety, righteous anger at the unfairness, then detachment. Beyond the emotional toll, the shelling eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the instant look-ups and sources that the work demands.

Outside, shockwaves tore windows from their casings; at a cousin's house, every window was destroyed, the furniture lay ruined, personal effects scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, painting at an easel, choosing not to let quiet and dirt have the ultimate victory.

Converting Grief

A image circulated online of a 23-year-old poet who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her verse went was widely shared next to her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an older woman running between alleys, calling a name. People said she had mourned a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some deep-seated memory. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

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

Translation as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself rendering a children’s tale 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 persisted creating until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all yearned for – seemingly impossible, yet still worth striving for.

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

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 dictionaries, insisting that translation become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, hope, practice, foundation, and symbol” all at once.

An Enduring Legacy

And then came the photograph. I saw it on a website and saw that, within the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old works, scarred but intact, my name printed on the cover. The image was in colour, but it might as well have been devoid of color, devoid of life among the rubble and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but enduring.

I stared at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a political act”, but I had never felt the complete significance of this until then. To translate, even under attack, 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 crumbles. It is a persistent, determined rejection to disappear.