Among those Devastated Remains of an Apartment Block, I Saw a Volume I Had Rendered

Within the wreckage of a collapsed apartment block, a single image stayed with me: a book I had translated from English to Persian, lying partially covered in dust and soot. Its jacket was ripped and stained, its leaves curled and singed, but it was still decipherable. Still speaking.

A City Amid Bombardment

Two days prior, rockets started hitting the city. There were no alarms, just unexpected, powerful blasts. The digital network was completely cut off. I was in my apartment, translating a text about what it means to carry language across tongues, and the morals and worries of inhabiting another’s voice. As structures collapsed, I sat polishing a text that suggested, in its understated way, for the endurance of purpose.

Everything stopped. A project my publishing house had been about to send to press was stranded when the printer closed. Retailers closed one by one. One night, when the blasts 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, stocked with dictionaries, hard-to-find volumes I had spent years collecting 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 Devastation

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be safer areas – places that, days later, were also targeted. My daughter departed to stay in another city. As her train was departing, she sent me a image: in the background, a factory was burning, dark smoke coiling into the sky. People nearest me were suddenly elsewhere, and danger seemed to chase them.

During those days, moods passed over the city like weather: swift terror, anxiety, righteous anger at the wrong, then detachment. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling eradicated my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the immediate queries and materials that the work demands.

Outside, shockwaves blew windows from their sashes; at a cousin's house, every window was broken, the furniture lay ruined, household items strewn throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the wreckage, creating at an stand, choosing not to let silence and dirt have the ultimate victory.

Converting Sorrow

A image spread online of a young poet who was lost 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. Neighbours said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had awakened some buried remembrance. She was searching for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: turning destruction into art, demise into lines, grief into search.

The Work as Resistance

A week after the attacks began, still in the midst of destruction, I found myself translating a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will recover only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried profound 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 impossible. I wondered if the moon was the calm we all desired – seemingly impossible, yet still worth striving for.

During those nights, I understood translation as something more than a skill: it was an act of perseverance, of holding one's ground, of holding on.

One day, in broad sunlight, blasts hit a prison; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a philosopher in his cell, 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, foundation, and symbol” all at once.

A Marked Voice

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, marked but whole, my name shown on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been devoid of color, stripped of life among the debris and ruins. For most of my career, I had been invisible, as all translators are. But here was my work made apparent – scarred, but persisting.

I gazed upon the image for a long time. The author writes that “all translation is a political act”, but I had never felt the true gravity of this until then. To translate, even under bombardment, was to say: “this voice mattered”. It will not be forgotten. To translate is not just to transport stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else crumbles. It is a quiet, determined declination to be silenced.