Within those Ruined Remains of an Apartment Block, I Encountered a Volume I Had Rendered

Within the rubble of a fallen building, a solitary sight lingered with me: a tome I had rendered from English to Persian, resting partially covered in dust and ash. Its cover was torn and smudged, its leaves bent and burned, but it was still decipherable. Still communicating.

A Metropolis Under Bombardment

Two days prior, rockets started hitting the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, powerful detonations. The internet was completely cut off. I was in my apartment, working on a work about what it means to transport language across languages, and the morals and worries of taking on another’s perspective. As edifices fell, I sat polishing a text that contended, in its subtle way, for the persistence of purpose.

Everything ceased. A project my publishing house had been about to send to press was stuck when the facility shut down. Retailers shut one by one. One night, when the explosions were too close, my family and I rushed down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the shelves in my apartment, filled with reference books, rare editions I had spent years gathering and every book I had ever translated. That collection was my career'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 safer locations – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a picture: in the distance, a factory was ablaze, dark smoke curling into the sky. People closest to me were suddenly elsewhere, and danger seemed to follow them.

During those days, emotions moved through the city like weather: swift terror, apprehension, moral outrage at the wrong, then detachment. Beyond the personal impact, the bombardment eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate queries and sources that translation demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their casings; at a relative's house, every sheet of glass was broken, the possessions lay broken, household items spread throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the destruction, working at an easel, choosing not to let stillness and dust have the final say.

Translating Pain

A photograph circulated online of a 23-year-old writer who was killed when missiles struck a building. Her poem went spread rapidly next to her image. On a street where I once bought dictionaries, I saw an aged woman dashing between alleys, yelling a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had stirred some repressed recollection. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

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

Translation as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still amidst destruction, I found myself translating a story for young readers 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 experienced the loss of his sight yet continued working until the end of his life, understood something about aiming at the unreachable. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all longed for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth reaching toward.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than a skill: it was an act of defiance, of remaining, of persisting.

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a facility; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his confinement, asking for more resources, insisting that language study become his “predominant activity”. For him, translation was – as the author puts it – “a reality, aspiration, practice, anchor, and metaphor” all at once.

A Scarred Voice

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

I looked at the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a statement”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under fire, was to say: “this voice had significance”. 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 quiet, stubborn refusal to vanish.