Among those Ruined Debris of an Residential Building, I Saw a Volume I Had Rendered

Among the wreckage of a collapsed apartment block, a single image lingered with me: a tome I had rendered from English to Persian, lying partly concealed in dirt and soot. Its cover was shredded and smudged, its pages curled and scorched, but it was still legible. Still communicating.

A Metropolis Under Attack

Two days prior, projectiles commenced attacking the city. There were no warnings, just abrupt, violent explosions. The web was totally cut off. I was in my apartment, translating a book about what it means to transport language across cultures, and the ethics and concerns of taking on another’s voice. As structures collapsed, I sat revising a text that argued, in its quiet way, for the endurance of significance.

Everything halted. A book my publishing house had been about to publish was halted when the printer shut down. Retailers locked their doors one by one. One night, when the blasts were too close, my family and I hurried down the stairs toward the cellar. I couldn’t stop dwelling on the library in my apartment, stocked with lexicons, rare editions I had spent years accumulating and every book I had ever translated. That archive was my career's work, and I didn’t know if I, or it, would make it through the night.

Dispersal and Loss

My spouse left with her parents for what they thought would be more secure locations – places that, days later, were also hit. My daughter travelled to stay in another city. As her train was pulling out, she sent me a image: in the faraway, a plant was burning, dark smoke curling into the sky. People dearest to me were suddenly somewhere else, and danger seemed to chase them.

During those days, feelings passed over the city like weather: instant fear, anxiety, moral outrage at the wrong, then numbness. Beyond the personal impact, the shelling dismantled my ability to work. Without power and the internet, I had no access to the quick searches and materials that the craft demands.

Outside, concussive forces tore windows from their sashes; at a relative's house, every window was broken, the belongings lay ruined, household items scattered throughout the rooms. When I visited, a woman sat before the ruins, working at an easel, refusing to let stillness and dust have the final say.

Translating Pain

A image spread on social media of a 23-year-old writer who was lost when missiles struck a building. Her poem went viral next to her image. On a street where I once bought books, I saw an elderly woman dashing between passages, shouting a name. Locals said she had lost a son in a war over 30 years ago, and now, the bombs had triggered some deep-seated memory. She was looking for a child who would never come home.

We were all translating, in our own way: turning devastation into picture, death into verse, mourning into quest.

The Work as Persistence

A week after the attacks began, still surrounded by devastation, I found myself rendering a story for young readers about a king whose daughter will heal only if she can hold the moon. Though written for children, it carried deep meaning for me then. The author, who experienced the loss of his sight yet persisted producing until the end of his life, understood something about reaching for the impossible. I wondered if the moon was the tranquility we all longed for – seemingly unattainable, yet still worth pursuing.

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

One day, in full sunlight, blasts hit a detention center; in those same hours, I was translating passages about a leader 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, discipline, foundation, and symbol” all at once.

An Enduring Voice

And then came the photograph. I saw it on a website and saw that, among the ruins of another apartment block, lay one of my old translations, damaged but whole, my name printed on the cover. The image was in color, but it might as well have been monochrome, devoid of life among the concrete and wreckage. For most of my career, I had been unseen, as all translators are. But here was my work made seen – 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 complete significance 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 transport stories across languages, but to help them endure when everything else falls away. It is a persistent, stubborn rejection to vanish.