Amid those Ruined Debris of an Residential Building, I Found a Volume I Had Rendered

In the wreckage of a collapsed apartment block, a single vision remained with me: a book I had translated from English to Persian, sitting partially covered in dust and ash. Its jacket was shredded and dirtied, its pages curled and scorched, but it was still legible. Still uttering words.

A Metropolis During Attack

Two days before, rockets started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just abrupt, violent blasts. The internet was totally cut off. I was in my flat, rendering a book about what it means to transport words across languages, and the principles and concerns of inhabiting someone else's perspective. As buildings came down, I sat revising a text that argued, in its subtle way, for the persistence of significance.

Everything stopped. A project my publishing house had been about to send to press was stranded when the printing house ceased operations. Bookstores shut one by one. One night, when the booms were too nearby, my family and I ran down the stairs toward the basement. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the library in my apartment, filled with lexicons, rare volumes I had spent years collecting and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my life's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Separation and Grief

My companion left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure towns – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a photo: in the background, a factory was burning, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly far away, and threat seemed to pursue them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like a front: instant fear, unease, indignation at the injustice, then detachment. Beyond the emotional toll, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without electricity and the internet, I had no access to the quick queries and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, shockwaves ripped windows from their frames; at a relative's house, every window was destroyed, the belongings lay damaged, objects strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, creating at an easel, choosing not to let quiet and dust have the final say.

Converting Sorrow

A photograph was shared online of a young poet who was died when missiles struck a building. Her verse went viral with her image. On a street where I once bought reference materials, I saw an elderly woman hurrying between passages, shouting a name. People said she had mourned a son in a conflict over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some repressed memory. She was seeking a child who would never come home.

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

The Craft as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by destruction, I found myself working on a children’s tale about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can possess the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who lost his sight yet kept working until the end of his life, understood something about striving for the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all longed for – seemingly out of reach, yet still worth reaching toward.

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

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader in his cell, asking for more resources, insisting that linguistic work become his “main activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a fact, goal, practice, anchor, and metaphor” all at once.

A Scarred Work

And then came the image. I noticed it on a platform and saw that, amid the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, marked but intact, my name shown 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 wreckage. For most of my career, I had been invisible, 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 political act”, but I had never felt the full weight 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 transport stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else crumbles. It is a subtle, unyielding rejection to vanish.